443. China’s Plot to Topple Trump: How to Bring Down a Superpower

0:00Thanks for listening to The Rest Is Politics, sign up to The Rest Is Politics plus to enjoy ad -free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to TheRestIsPolitics .com. That's TheRestIsPolitics .com. This extraordinary meeting which brought Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin together increasingly those countries now see the US as a more and more aggressive, unpredictable threat. I hate to say this, but it's been perfectly timed for Xi Jinping. China has seen us, the US's big peer competitor. Instead of having China isolated with Russia pealed off, they've been forced together.

0:36There's so much trolling of Trump going on this. Russia can say things China can't. They have this mate who can go out there saying unbelievably aggressive on hostile things against the West. We've really effed things up. Well, we've now in a position where the Chinese Communist Party can hold the moral high ground. This episode is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse is currently one of the fastest growing energy suppliers in the UK. On this September they're raising the stakes. One lucky new sign -up will receive £20 ,000 in cash. And what's over the first, the energy price gap goes up again. And Fuse is one of the few things that's going to be trying to help you deal with that.

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3:07Welcome to the rest of the politics face to face with Lee Alistair Campbell. And with me, Rory Stewart, and you are back from Bosnia and Singapore. Yes. We talked about Bosnia last week. We'll talk a little bit about Singapore this week. I meant that for the Ornys. Is it the Ornys? The Ornys? Or the Ornys? It's the Ornys. Yeah, just say Ornys. Why do we say the Ornys? Well, I don't put it as plural on, but you're right. I put in a definite article, which I just like to put in. It's like the Ukraine, which is the wrong, very weird one. And it's like people who say Afghans, on this you say Afghans, it's all very strange.

3:35So, Rory, we've talked a lot in recent weeks about United States, about Ukraine, about Gaza. We're going to stay very much on the foreign policy focus, but very much focused on Asia, on China. There's a extraordinary meeting that Xi Jinping has been hosting. Then in the second half, we're going to look at the socios of Southeast Asian nations. You were in Singapore right at the moment of this extraordinary meeting which brought Modi, Xi Jinping and Putin together. So India, China and Russia together, Shanghai Corporation organization, give us a bit of a sense of that. Well, I do think this meeting is very consequential.

4:13I mean, the Shanghai cooperation organization has been going for some time. It started with a mainly Russia and China known for the stands, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, a few others. And then it's grown and the signs are that it's growing still because some of the people who are there are not full members of the SEO, but they're there at this thing, which I think has been, I hate to say this, but it's been perfectly timed for Xi Jinping. And the absent force in this is of course Trump because Modi, And I think I'm glad to see the New York Times finally agrees with me that the real story at the heart of the India, US rupture is the Nobel Peace Prize.

4:52The fact that Pakistan has said that they would nominate Trump and Modi was really pissed off that Trump tried to take credit as this is one of his 10 wars it is now that he stopped. The India Pakistan skirmishes recently. And so Modi is there and Modi is there very much, I think, signaling that the bipartisan American 25, 30 -year effort to get Modi much more into the American orbit, he's kind of resisting that, not least because of the way that Trump has treated it. And of course Putin, fresh from his winnatex or summit with Trump in Alaska, is there very much looking just like one of the big three in this new Nexus.

5:33And of course, Russia India has been tricky, India China has been tricky, not least because of the border skirmishes that happened a few years ago and the war of the 60s. But also China, Russia is tricky. And yet Trump has seemingly bought them all together in a way that makes them look like, well, they're definitely vying to be a rival collection to the Western Alliance. strategically, as you're saying, the big US policy really for 20 -30 years has been to think about how to make sure that China is relatively isolated. China's seen us, the US's big peer competitor, and there have been different US attempts to do this, and it went on through all these different administrations, Republican Democrats through the Biden.

6:17And through Trump, one. And through Trump, one. And the idea was, as you say, very important idea that India, which is this enormous population and increasingly enormous economy would remain within the Western orbit. The Japan, South Korea, Philippines, Vietnam, Australia would be on the US side. And then there was another idea which was being sold by some of the people who are in the new Trump team. So Marco Rubio seemed to talk about this Elbridge Colby, who's the deputy defense guy he's talked about, of what they called a reverse Kissinger. And the idea was that in the 1970s, Nixon and Kissinger decided to isolate Russia by reaching out to China.

6:54The reverse cursing was going to go in the other direction. We're going to isolate China by reaching out to Russia. And there was some people who thought when Trump started taking the Russian side on Ukraine, maybe this is what he's up to. But as you say, this conference in Xinjiang shows the collapse of the entire strategy because instead of having China isolated with Russia pealed off through Trump's charm offensive and Modi pealed off in the other direction, what's happened is they've been forced together, they've been forced together. I guess one very, very fundamental way, which is increasingly those countries now see the US as a more and more aggressive, unpredictable threat.

7:33If you're China, you're thinking, is the US Navy going to stop my oil supplies coming through? If you're Russia, you really are very conscious of all the stuff that the US and the West have done against its economic system. If you're India, you're now facing 50 % tariffs. And you're facing it in a way that you can't predict. I mean, I wanted to turn to you on this because if you're Modi, you're going to be very perplexed. You would have thought that you'd done everything right. Ambani, who's the guy, the big Indian billionaire who processes the oil, had invited Jared Kushner and Trump's daughter to his wedding and the sort of kind of big deal.

8:09Modi and Trump seem to be mates. And there was a general sense that Trump was like some sort of classic kind of old -style dictator and all you needed to do was invite the family to the wedding and give some other attend Trump buildings, I think, in India. And yet none of that worked. And that's why you see, I think that, see, you have this bipartisan policy of Republican Democrat presence, as you say. And with very little resistance, basically saying, India's going to be a future power, we've got to get them on board, et cetera. Trump seems to do that term one. You had these, what came across as like, love -ins between the two of them, going to, you know, I think there's 110 ,000 people at one of the rallies that they did together in term one.

8:50And the only thing I can think of that caused this rift is this, indeed, Pakistan Nobel Prize thing. 2001, America lifted sanctions on India that it imposed because of its nuclear program. 2005, it began actually negotiating a pretty generous nuclear cooperation deal signed in 2008 and then 2016 they made India a quote, major defense partner which made it access to some of the technologies without becoming a kind of fully -fledged ally. So that's what's being, it would seem being reversed. And if you think about it, the raising of the tariffs to 20 to 50%, which is going to hit their economy and particularly small and medium sized people really badly.

9:33The reason that Trump gave was because of Indian increase in the buying of crude Russian oil, which is true. We've talked about this before. It went from, I think, 1 % of their oil to something like a third. But China is a bigger importer of Russian crude, and yet he's not gone after Xi Jinping in the same way. Well, just from the business side, being one of the really substantial things that I think has come out of this summit is Putin and G have done some sort of deal on the new Siberian pipeline. So this is about energy from Russia to Mongolia. And again avoiding American ships. Absolutely.

10:10You're not exposed to the Navy and the sea. And if you look at what Xi Jinping said, member states, he's talking here about the SCO should quote, oppose cold war mentality, which is what we normally associate with Deb and Russia. Block -based confrontation and bullying, and that, by the way, is looking at Modi when he says that and is talking about the terrorists, and safeguard the international system with the United Nations at its core. And if you think about that, so China is often seen by the Brits and by the Americans as the country that is most blocking anything that happens at the United Nations, and he's flipped this around.

10:51This is something fascinating. So Xi Jinping's been trying for years to sell this line and nobody's been listening and Trump has suddenly made it plausible. Yeah, suddenly for the first time China's attempt to say we represent predictability, the UN system, fair business, which seemed ridiculous to Yusuke. And now seems very interesting. Second thing. On Russia, the China -Russia relationship is amazing because on the surface, people say Russia is a much smaller economy. what China got to benefit. You've talked about oil and there's other material things like the fact that Russia is a market for Chinese goods.

11:29But I think there's a bigger thing which is that Russia can say things China can't. So if we take your point that China is portraying itself as the guardian of the international rules -based system, they have this mate who can go out there saying unbelievably aggressive and hostile things against the West. They have a friend in Russia who has nuclear weapons, they have a friend in Russia who has a network of allies in Africa that they can draw on and in Central Asia that they can draw on, and they have a friend who can propose things they can't propose. So Russia can say things like, we're going to create an independent payment system.

12:05We're going to get away from the old US dominated system, and it's a very, I don't quite how you define the relationship, but Russia is very, very useful to China. They also do though, all three of them still have their tensions. I mean, the border stuff has never been fully resolved with India. Xi Jinping is probably a little bit worried about the extent to which North Korea is getting a bit too cozy with Putin. And Kim Jong -un is going to be at this massive military parade. This is apparently, and again, I think there's so much trolling of Trump going on this. They are sort of almost willfully saying, you had your military parade Trump.

12:40It was a total flop. This is going to be the biggest you've ever seen. This is going to be the kind of military parade that Trump really loved to see in Washington. Modi, who Trump would expect to be sort of, you know, down in his knees begging to be allowed back into the American orbit, arrives at the meeting literally holding hands with Vladimir Putin. They walk in hand in hand. They go and join Xi Jinping, who looks like he's the main guy. They're sort of slightly bearing down to him. Modi then posts a picture of himself in his car with Vladimir Putin, who of course Trump had got into his car, but unlike, unlike Trump, Modi has a camera in the car.

13:22So the picture of him imputed and he does a tweet saying, always interesting to talk to this guy. And then I think the other thing that's really interesting about what Xi Jinping is doing, because the other thing that they feel, and this is partly their fault because they've always, you know, never really worried too much about international communication, they feel that the story of the Second World War has been overly dominated by America and the Allies. So we America, Britain, we think we want the Second World War. And they think that actually the real battles that decided the Second World War were fought in and by the Chinese and the Russians.

14:00And the Chinese against Japan, Russia against Germany. Correct. And that is another story that he's been telling you. So what this week has become essentially has been militarily with this massive show that we're going to see on Wednesday. Difflematically by bringing these... I mean the rest of the politics podcast not actually going to see that show. I mean we're not going to sit there. We're not flying to Beijing to... To win us the tanks. I'm not told you yet. Well we are going to be watching until our television story or in your case on a sort of laptop and then the other thing is this history stuff which to them is incredibly important and of course that relates to Taiwan as well because what they feel is that out of the post -war settlement that the French, the Brits, the Americans should have had a better understanding of China's quotes rights to Taiwan.

14:45So this is like a big deal that's happening right now and it's very, I think a lot of it is very psychological geared towards an America and they want the American diplomatic political class to be thinking and saying, Trump, I'm afraid you have created this. David Roney who was the economist correspondent in China and it's now their geopolitics. A correspondent has pointed out that the Shanghai Corporation organization that you've been talking about a few years ago didn't really look like it added up to very much. Nobody could quite work out what it was going to do and he points out that China is perpetually kind of floating these funny organizations and seeing if they work on it.

15:23I think there was another one called the Confidence and Stability Organization and that BRICS is another one we can talk about in a second. And the story really here was it didn't make much sense because actually Central Asia was basically controlled by the Russians, the Chinese didn't have much influence over it, and then Iran joined and then India and Pakistan are both in and they don't really like each other, so how are you really going to make this work? As you say, suddenly it's gotten you life because suddenly it's an opportunity for Modi to demonstrate he's not dependent on Trump. Bricks is another interesting one.

15:54So Bricks we've talked about before has begun to expand from Russia India, China, South Africa to take in all these other states that are now queuing up to join. I think this is the beginning of us looking at new organizations, which we can't quite find. They're not tight like NATO. They have those kind of security guarantees. They have Article 5. They're not the European Union. They're not writing those kind of trade things. We'll get onto one of them, maybe after the break, which is ACM, because we just come back from Singapore. But they are a very, very odd shifting symbol. If you listen to Amlis, I've been listening a lot to an amazing guy called Sasha Kobuya, who's the Carnegie, he's the Carnegie Russia expert, and he says, you know, they're blocks, they're but not economic blocks, they're clubs, they're not alliances, they're mini -lattuals, and then he produces others because he's a Russian intellectual, they're sentiments, they're synonyms, they're acronyms, they're regions, right.

16:50But I think we'll keep coming back to these as we keep stunning because I think they are increasingly useful as the US alliances begin to fray. And the US had a few going. It had Orcas had this quad arrangement and Asia which is still going but must be that massive classic is how what happens to the quad which is America Australia, Japan, India. What happens to that now that he's sort of basically said to Modi you are basically PNG never dogma. And actually it's been pretty aggressive on on Japan but there is to. Yeah, just to go back to my little trip to Singapore because it relates to what you've just said and by the way Singapore Have just they're talking I think with Morocco and the UAE About forming an organization of smaller economies to try to get back to what they would say as more fair trading and So there's lots of new things are gonna emerge from this.

17:43So I was at an event in Singapore with about 500 people in the audience from the energy industries and the insurance industries. And some quite big cheeses. And there was about half and half Asian and the rest were expert American, British, Australian, German, whatever. And they very helpfully gave me one of those fancy polling apps that you can get instant answers, right? Now, first thing I did, I asked the view that I've done this before it was, and I said, hands up, this would be without the app, hands up if you've mentioned the name Trump in the last 24 hours, okay? And around about two -thirds, three -quarters put the hands up.

18:25And then said, this would be for the Shanghai thing, hands up if you've mentioned Xi Jinping in the last 24 hours, three hands. I'll come back to I think that's significant, it's basically just because he just keeps on going, he doesn't feel the need to be shouting and tweeting and all that stuff. Then said, which is on the polling app now, which is the most powerful country in the world? USA or China? China 60, USA 40. Okay. Which country do you think will most benefit from Trump's terrorist policy? USA 19, China 81. So this is serious business people thinking this doesn't add up. This is going to harm America more than it harms us.

19:08And this was the absolute killer for me. Which of the two superpowers do you see as the greater threat to global stability? I guess. I guess you're going to say US now. USA 79 in China 21. Now I just do not believe that would have been the case a year ago. No, it's unimaginable because I was thinking about this on the way in to see this morning that it's a kind of miracle that the US given how rich it is, given how many troops it has, given it had nuclear weapons that it managed for 70 years to basically convince the world, it wasn't for most people a threat to stability. But many, many countries in the world sort of understood where the US was coming from, understood roughly what the rules were, and therefore, you know, if you're Europe, you allow yourself to be completely dependent on US security guarantees in a way that you wouldn't have accepted Chinese or Russian security guarantees.

20:02But once it flips, once America starts acting unpredictably, starts flinging bombs around the Iranian nuclear sites, starts talking about clearing out Gaza, starts talking about grabbing Greenland, starts putting 50 % tariffs, starts saying to Europe, by the way, we're not providing security guarantees, you can spend five percent of your GDP on defense, then people wake up and say, wait a second, this country is so big, so powerful, It's potentially unbelievably dangerous. What happens to the US Navy start stopping our oil moving out? What happens if they start doing to us what they did to Russia?

20:37What happens if Trump wakes up and thinks, oh, I've got all these stuff, they're toys in my inbox. I can, I tariffs just the beginning. I can sanction you, I can invade you, I can bomb you. And then you really begin to think, well, how do we have other allies? How do we deal with this? Essentially how, we've got today, Tuesday, we've got this Bolsonaro trial starting in Brazil, which is of course part of the bricks, but it's really interesting if you think about it that that is a case of where the institutions of a country like Brazil appear to be holding in a way that in America the institutions don't appear to be holding and of course what the What the Chinese can can say and and they've started to be much more open about this, you know, we've you meet Chinese diplomats and people who are kind of in the Chinese sphere They will start to say much more open than they used to you know your democracy is just not working How they they can't get anything done and the thing or the other thing I've noticed is that the French Appeared to be hitting back a lot harder Macron did a tweet the other day basically saying with now past Trump's deadline on Putin He's been played again Le Pois, the French news magazine is out today and the front page Trump will see this I've got no doubt is basically Putin's man, you know, the man from Moscow is a picture of Trump.

21:54In the last couple of weeks, two European countries have called in the American ambassador. The French, because Kushner, Jared Kushner's dad, who's the eminently qualified, pardoned convicted criminal who's now the ambassador, he got called in for basically saying that Macron was fueling anti -Semitism because of recognition of Palestine. And in Denmark, the ambassador's been called in because they keep going on about Greenland. So there's a little bit of sign of fighting back. And really the other thing, I mean, maybe I'm over, I'm sort of overstating this. If you look at the picture that's sort of been dominant from the meeting in China, Modi, Putin and Xi, it's very similar to the picture of Trump and Putin.

22:35It's almost in an identical room with interpreters just hanging back and they're sort of smiling and Putin looks a lot happier. And I guess the must be part of Trump that has a sort of fantasy see that he could host this type of meeting and be one of the hang out with a three or four other strong men in the world. But it doesn't work because the problem is that nobody in the end is going to quite believe that the American Western liberal democratic system is going to be compatible with those types of relationships. So he can stage these things. And I'm sure he'd have a dream that he could do a military parade and Putin and C and Modi would all turn up and they'd do it together, but it doesn't work.

23:13Whereas China can very credibly say, we've been at this for a very, very long time. You can rely on us. We've got these big interests and pipelines. That's why I say it's so interesting that so few people talked about it, because they don't need to talk about it. They kind of know what he's trying to do. It's clear. He has these very occasional big international moments. We've got one now, but then he just kind of gets on with stuff. And there was an Australian who was at this event that I was speaking at. There was a dinner of the night before and he said it'd been a typical Aussie way, it says, you know, I mean, we've really effed things up.

23:48Well, we're now in a position where the Chinese Communist Party can hold the moral high ground over our alliances. And the point about the alliances is there's this meeting in China that's very ordered and you see the family photo and it's all sort of minute by minute, everything works. And the contrast was post the Alaska the European leaders all getting onto planes and sort of rushing over to Trump to try to get something going on Ukraine, result of which has been literally zilch. As I'm afraid we predict it, I mean I do think this is a very very odd thing that Trump managed to create an expectation in the media three weeks ago that I honestly never believed that he was on the cusp of solving it.

24:29You know there was going to be this peace deal that the Europeans all somehow convinced themselves they could talk him into it. It was all the story about how Trump have been played and we sort of emphasize it, but I think we keep coming back to the fact that Trump doesn't change as much as we want to believe that he's consistently been on Putin's side, he's still on Putin's side and he doesn't really listen to the other years. How does he feel? Because we know you watch a lot of television, we're assuming that this meeting will have been covered with Fox News. How does he feel when you seize them effectively laughing at him?

25:02Because that is kind of what they're doing. They're basically saying, you've given me, you've given me, you've given me, you've You've given me Modi this smack in the face and here I am holding hands with the guy who's you know war in Europe and bowing down a little bit to the guy that you say is a great superpower enemy. I can't get in Trump's head and I'm sure the mucis much better at this than me but my only one thing I would say is that with people like Putin we imagine that Trump is on our side and therefore we imagine that when Putin refuses to accept Ukrainian demands Trump or feel that Putin is laughing at him.

25:39My view is that Trump isn't on our side. Trump's on Putin's side, what he's really interested in is getting some minerals feel or some economic opening and lifting sanctions. The Russian, he doesn't give a monkeys about the fact that Putin is flousing him about the European position on Ukraine because the European position on Ukraine is not Trump's position on Ukraine. The other question I asked them was which other countries or entities could become a rival superpower or a replacement super of one of the two. Now it was meant to be a word cloud which didn't work. So they were only had a choice of four, okay.

26:13So it wasn't complete, but the four probably aren't wrong, three of them anyway. European Union, India, Saudi Arabia, or Brazil came up as well. So what do you think the rough sort of live land was? It a very well -informed, senior business audience in Asia of those four? Of those four, which they would put India first? by a mile well over half and then European Union and Saudi are right back together in Brazil kind of nowhere which you know I think it's very low. Because India is there, a billion people, it's purchasing power parity. GDP is now enormous, you know much bigger in purchasing power parity in the UK.