This is an edited transcript of an episode of “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.
This episode contains strong language.
Here’s a simple principle that I believe deeply: You cannot make a good argument for a bad policy. You cannot make a coherent argument for an incoherent policy.
You can imagine tariff regimes that are defensible. You can imagine critiques of the previous era of global trade that are coherent. The problem is none of them fit what President Donald Trump is actually doing.
It’s darkly funny watching Trump’s defenders pivot online from defending the morning’s tariffs as necessary shock therapy for an economy that has been corrupted by decadence and greed for an economy where we care about the markets but have abandoned the Midwest — only to shift by that afternoon to how brilliant it was for Trump to pause those very same tariffs: Just look at that stock market recovery. Brilliant stuff, sir. Textbook “The Art of the Deal.”
Where we are right now, as I write this on Monday, April 14, is an all-out trade war with China. We’ve also laid tariffs on the rest of the world — but the big ones are on China. The tariffs there are well over a hundred percent.
We’re being told this is all necessary because we need to bring those supply chains back from China, particularly the advanced ones: They built their economy and power on the backs of our iPhones, our batteries, our semiconductors. We need all of that back.
But no — wait, wait, wait! Breaking news: Most electronics are now exempted from the China tariffs. We’re going to tariff shoes from China at a higher rate than laptops in this policy apparently designed to reshore advanced manufacturing. Apple, in particular, seems to have wriggled out of the tariffs.
Or no, wait, wait — maybe not. Now Trump is saying that the exemptions that his own administration announced are just fake news. The same goods will be tariffed in some different way later for some unapparent reason.
Even right now, I cannot tell you what these tariffs are or will be. Imagine trying to make investment decisions based on them.
What I can tell you is that China is retaliating. They’ve halted exports of rare earth minerals and magnets necessary for the production of many advanced technological products. Is that going to help our manufacturers to be in a position where they cannot manufacture key goods — but China can? Did the Trump administration plan for this entirely foreseeable response?
The questions answer themselves. What if you get into a trade war with China and you lose? What if, after infuriating the rest of the world, putting tariffs on them, too, you make China look stronger, more reliable, more farsighted, more strategic in the eyes of all these other countries that are now looking for an exit from the unreliable consequences of U.S. hegemony?
I want to talk about China today. I think one reason the administration felt it was safer to retrench to something that could be described more as a trade war with China is that a bipartisan consensus has hardened around China. Trump set this into motion in his 2016 campaign, but then Democrats embraced it, too: China is a rising power, and we’ve made a terrible mistake in letting them rise. We are in danger of being a falling power. China ripped us off. They took our manufacturing jobs. They addicted us and our allies to their cheap labor and their cheap goods. And China doesn’t just want to be rich. It wants to rule. First Taiwan — then who knows what else?
I’m not going to tell you this story is entirely wrong. It’s not. And I’m not going to tell you that all the Republicans and Democrats who believe it wanted Trump’s trade war specifically. They didn’t.
But I will tell you that I’ve been surprised and alarmed for years now by how this new, much more hawkish and angry consensus has hardened. How hard it has become to question.
I get nervous when it becomes clear to me that we’ve chosen a new foreign enemy in Washington and that the politics on both sides no longer really allow for contrary voices or understandings. And so I’ve been concerned by the trends in China policy for a while — not because I think China is a pure or good actor, but because I think the politics have aligned around hostility and escalation in a way that can become self-reinforcing.
And I worry about it because I think American policy is now outdated. It wants a redo of the 1990s or the early 2000s. It is focused on its mistakes in the past. It is out of touch with what China is in the present.
One person whom I’ve heard questioning this consensus more and more loudly is Thomas L. Friedman, my Times Opinion colleague. I talked to him after a recent trip he took to China, and I remember the first thing he said to me: We’re screwed. We are getting this wrong.
And then he explained why.
I thought it would be good for everyone to hear what he told me. Not because everyone has to agree with Tom’s take on this. But if the consensus politics is leading us where Trump has gone, maybe it’s time to hear some voices that are questioning that consensus.
Ezra Klein: Tom Friedman, welcome to the show.
Thomas Friedman: Great to be with you, Ezra.
You said something in one of your recent columns that struck me — that the pandemic was bad for many things, but one of the things it was particularly bad for, and that is underrated, is our ability to understand China. Why?
Virtually all the American business executives in China left China during Covid. And then after Covid, we began this process of decoupling. So you basically had six years with very little American presence there.
When I was in China last year, I felt like I was the only American there. You just didn’t see any other Americans — not tourists, not business people, not anybody.
I wrote then that it was like America and China were two elephants looking at each other through a straw. Having just been there two weeks ago, I would say now they’re like two elephants looking at each other through a needle. The aperture has just gotten tiny.
A point I’ve heard you make is that in that six-year period, there was only one Congressional delegation that went to China.
You said this in a column, too — that typically in America, the problem in our politics is that we are too divided on issues. It makes it hard to discuss them in any kind of comprehensible fashion. But on the issue of China, specifically, we have too much consensus.
How would you describe the bipartisan Washington consensus on China?
Starting with Trump 1.0 and then into the Biden administration and now Trump 2.0, it kind of became against the law in Washington, D.C., to say anything positive about China. And because of that, there was an aversion to going to China. There was an aversion that American industry began to develop to hiring Chinese workers. There was an aversion, on American college campuses, to sending students to school in China.
So you had this giant asymmetry, where China has 260,000 to 270,000 students studying in America. And we have a few thousand studying there.
The back story to this is not an American failure at all. It has to do with also what happened with President Xi Jinping, who rose to power in 2013 and then made himself, in effect, president for life. China went in reverse. It made a U-turn. The China that we thought was more or less two steps forward, one step back on a trajectory for more openness at home and more integration with the world — that really stopped under Xi Jinping.
And it was combined with a program Xi launched, which was to basically make sure that China dominated all the 21st-century industries, from aerospace to new materials to autonomous vehicles to robots. That changed the whole chemistry of the U.S.-China relationship.
But central to that, Ezra, was that the ballast in this relationship was always the American business community. They were the ones who, for many years, beginning in the late ’70s, were making money in China. And even when the relationship got rocky and even when we perceived that China was not living up to trade obligations under the World Trade Organization, American business would basically lobby and say: Be cool. It’s OK. We’re still making money here.
And what happened? This combination of Xi taking a U-turn, and fewer and fewer American businesses feeling they were getting the benefits out of China that they wanted and were having to transfer too much technology, and then China rising with its own homegrown technological prowess — those three things really blew up the relationship.
You mention it in terms of the reduction in these cross-border exchanges, technology exchanges and student exchanges.
The other side of that story I have heard from Americans, business leaders and other people in power was the growing belief and recognition that China had been conducting a massive level of industrial and even educational and political espionage against America.
Some of the fears about Chinese students studying here, about hiring Chinese workers here, was a feeling that, at a high level — though not predictable to any individual person — a lot of this was leading to spying and to the theft of technological secrets.
And connected to that, there was a belief that the espionage was what was behind China’s rise — that China wasn’t just rising, but that what they were doing was stealing from us.
And building on top of that, you have this quote from Senator Josh Hawley, a Republican influential on foreign affairs: China can’t really innovate, they can just steal from us.
I’m curious how you think that played into it.
I can’t speak to the espionage — I just don’t know.
Given these Washington conversations with officials where it goes like: If only you knew what I knew, you would be more worried.
And my reaction to that is: I wish I knew what you knew, because it would put everything in more perspective.
But part of my reaction to that is that I hope we’re doing the same to them. I hope we’re spying and conducting whatever we need to do for our national security purposes.
But the notion that they can’t innovate — what gives the lie to that is if you talk to American or European businesses who operate in China, what they’ll tell you is: We first came here for the market, and now we come here to be close to the innovation. And we cannot be in touch with the cutting edge of our field, particularly in autos, unless we’re here.
China realized it could not compete with America on combustion vehicles. And so it took the decision to leapfrog them right to electric vehicles and, ultimately, autonomous driving cars. It did so by having its smartphone companies become car companies.
When I came to China after Covid, I said: Wow. When I was last here, Xiaomi was a phone company. I came back, and they were a car company. When I was here last, Huawei was a phone company. I came back, they were a car company.
So basically, they put their cellphones on wheels. And the reason this is important is that, when you get into a Didi — Didi is their Uber — it is a seamless digital experience. It syncs up with your cellphone.
I rode in a Huawei car when I was in China recently, and I was riding with someone from Huawei. He took out his laptop, pulled down a screen that came out of the ceiling and his laptop immediately synced with that screen and he was working in the car.
He says: Do you want to see anything?
I said: Yes, get me Paul Simon’s concert in London’s Hyde Park. I’d like to watch that on the way to your campus.
I’d say it was up in about 30 seconds. And the sound, Ezra. I have never in my life heard sound like this in a moving vehicle. It is just so far ahead of anything I’ve seen here.
I met with Volkswagen’s China head when I was there. They’ve got a whole facility there. They call it in China for China — that unless you’re competing with the best — what my friend Jörg Wuttke, a former longtime president of the European Union Chamber of Commerce in China, calls the China Fitness Club. Unless you’re in the gym with them, you are going to get run over.
This conversation we’re having emerges out of a conversation we had a little bit randomly on the phone.
You had just come from China, and I had just come back from a book tour. And we were talking about something else, but then I asked you how your China trip was, and what you said to me was: Ezra, you have no idea how screwed we are.
Yes, because what you see when you’re there is the product of 30 years of being in the fitness gym. It works like this: A new industry comes along. Let’s call it solar panels. Every major city in China decides they need a solar panel factory. The local government subsidizes it — maybe domestically born, maybe in partnership with a foreign one.
And you end up, in a very short period of time with — I’m making the number up, but 75 solar panel companies. They then compete like crazy against each other in the fitness gym, and five of them survive. Those five are so fit that they can then go global at a price and level of innovation that is very hard for a foreign competitor to deal with — which is why China today basically controls the global solar panel market.
But what you also don’t see is that process of winnowing down from a hundred of those solar panel companies to the five produced a massive explosion of supply chains domestically to feed that industry.
The same thing went on with cars. The same thing goes on with robots. So where you end up five years later is with an interlocking set of supply chains that now, if you’re a young Chinese and say: I just got this idea. I want to produce a shirt that has a pink polka dot button that can sing the Chinese national anthem backward — someone will have it for you tomorrow.
The process you’re describing here: The Chinese government identifies solar panels as an industry. Using a variety of mechanisms, they absolutely flood the country with subsidized financing to become a solar panel company.
And you get very strange things here. There was an example a couple of years back where one of the big real estate firms there that was in crisis tried to become an E.V. firm because then they would get a bunch of financing.
The Chinese government absorbs a huge amount of waste, failure and graft. Solyndra times a thousand. Things we would never accept in this country.
So a bunch of these firms just pockets money for nothing. A bunch of them fail. But on the other side of that process of failure, waste and graft, you get these very potent — national champions, they’re called — that then the Chinese government puts a huge amount of resources behind.
I want to add one other thing because it speaks to some of the trade fights we’re having. For China to have the money to do this — to not require more efficiency from their own companies and their own investments — part of the way they’re doing it is keeping wages suppressed in their country. Part of the way they’re doing it is exporting much more than they consume. Part of the way they’re doing it is maintaining a kind of imbalanced economy, highly focused on production.
But going back to this idea of the fitness gym: In America, we understand capitalism as the survival of the fittest. But the Chinese government doesn’t demand that you’re very fit at the beginning. They demand that you’re fit at the end.
We actually demand — with the exception of some venture capital investments that are usually fairly small scale — that you’re fit at the beginning.
It’s a very good point. And I’ll give you a perfect example of that.
Ford Motor today has built a battery factory in Marshall, Mich., using Inflation Reduction Act money from the Biden administration. That factory makes batteries for E.V.s. The technology, though, comes from China. It’s a company called CATL. That CATL technology was actually born in America during the Obama administration. People tried to scale it here back then. They failed. It went into bankruptcy.
And a Chinese entrepreneur bought it, took it back to China, scaled it there and is now doing tech transfer to Ford, bringing it back here.
It’s a perfect example of what you’re talking about — the lack of patience.
I want to go back to this question of the Washington consensus. It’s a reason I wanted to have this conversation.
I get very nervous when both parties agree on something too much. And what I find now is that, among Democrats and Republicans alike, you put it as: You can’t say a nice word about China.
But I would put it as: It is a completely universal belief that would be politically lethal in most cases to question, if you have any national ambitions, that openness toward China would be the right strategy, that trying to rebuild our relationship with China would be the right strategy.
You can have Trump’s version of hostility: unfathomably high tariffs, very antagonistic language.
Or you can have a more Democratic version of hostility: The Biden administration’s trying to wall off a bunch of advanced technologies, which maybe was the right call, or Nancy Pelosi’s visiting Taiwan.
But what you can’t have is the view that the right approach to China is more interconnection and an effort to pull our relationship back from the brink, where both sides are ratcheting up hostility and preparing for the possibility of all-out war.
You’ve been covering this for a long time. Tell me how you think that consensus developed. How did we move from where we were under the Obama administration, negotiating the Trans-Pacific Partnership, which was a way to move trade away but also pivot to Asia and be more engaged — which is a much softer form of competition — to what happens under Trump 1.0, Biden and Trump 2.0, which is one of the sharper reform policy changes we’ve seen in recent decades?
Let me back into your question by giving you my worldview and how I think of this whole China issue.
I think that the net result of where we are as a world, in terms of development right now in the — call this the post-post-Cold War era — is that humanity faces three existential questions.
One is how we manage artificial general intelligence. We are going to have to find a way to collaborate to make sure we get the best and cushion the worst out of what is going to be a new species. That’s No. 1.
Second, as a product of our development, we have unleashed a level of climate change that we have to collaborate on in order to deal with.
And third, I believe the combination of all these stresses is going to blow up a lot of weak states, and you’re going to have zones of disorder. You already see that in some parts of the world.
My view is there are only two superpowers who can manage this — but only if they collaborate: the United States and China. They can learn that early, or they can learn that late. They can learn that painlessly or painfully. But my view is they’re going to have to learn that.
So for me, liking China, not liking China — it’s just not in my equation. That is the world I think we’re going into. I also think we’re going into a world that I think of as an industrial ecosystem. I was born into the late Industrial Revolution, where the ecosystem to thrive as a country was coal, steel, aluminum, combustion engines and combustion-driven vehicles, and electricity.
And you had to be playing in all of those industries to thrive. I think the world we’re going into, the ecosystem to thrive is going to be robots, electric batteries, artificial intelligence, E.V.s and autonomous driving cars. That ecosystem will be the flywheel that’s going to drive everything.
And therefore, to me, as an American, it’s essential that we play in that ecosystem and that we are able to compete head-to-head with China in that ecosystem.
That’s how I’m coming at this problem. I’m not even thinking about Taiwan. I’m not thinking about communism or capitalism. I quoted a Trump official a while back who said that China’s goal in the world is to spread authoritarian Marxism.
Oh, my God. China’s got a lot of goals in the world, Ezra. But one of them is not spreading authoritarian Marxism. OK? They’re trying to spread Muskism, not Marxism. That’s the game they’re trying to beat us at. They’re trying to beat us at our game — not Karl Marx’s game. And we need to understand that and be serious about it.
And the last thing I’d say, given those are the industries we need to be in, is this China thing, this country: You can love them or hate them — and believe me, I do both every day. But these are serious people. They aren’t messing around like you’ve just seen Donald Trump mess around for the last week. And they don’t hire knuckleheads and put them into key positions for the most part.
Those are all the biases I’m coming to this story with. Then I walk into the Washington debate, and it’s: Are you a panda hugger? Are you not a panda hugger? Did you say something nice about China or not nice about China?
And I just run away with my hair on fire because that conversation is just not about the world I see us going into — a world I want America to thrive in. And a world where, I think to thrive, we need to be serious about these issues.
Let me try to steel-man what I think happened in the Washington consensus. I’ve talked to many Democrats about this, and they would say: Tom Friedman is naive. There was a bill of goods sold, and the bill of goods had a couple of parts to it. One is that if we welcome China into the global trading order, they would trade more, they would get richer, they would consume more, and they would also liberalize.
And they did get richer. But they have kept domestic consumption depressed through a bunch of different policies, and they have become more authoritarian under Xi, which you mentioned but is a big deal here. They’ve had profound human rights abuses, like with the Uyghurs.
But deeper than that, you’re very dismissive of this idea that the Chinese Communist Party, at its core, is an ideological project meant to spread Chinese power and communist ideology.
But they say: No. If you really look into the way Xi rules and the kinds of study sessions he makes people go through, this is very much an ideological expansionist power.
The idea of the Thucydides trap becomes very common — that there are these two superpowers, there can be only one eventually, and we need to be prepared for that.
And what we’ve ultimately been doing here is weakening ourselves and strengthening China. Our industrial base has moved too much to China. We’re too dependent on them for supply.
And I think this really all comes to a head after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, when people see how the dependence on Russian natural gas weakened Europe, and the world’s response. And the feeling became: China has become more dangerous than we’ve given it credit for. It has grown its industrial base at our expense without becoming a good actor, both domestically and in the international political system we were promised. And we cannot allow ourselves to be in a position in the future where we are in some kind of war or conflict with China, and yet we are looking to them to make all of the things we need to compete with them. And, as such, what you need to do is decouple. You need to understand them as an antagonistic power that we treat as a hostile enemy.
That is my account of how the center of gravity changed. And I think what I just told you would be what many Democrats in Congress would tell you — not just Republicans.
What is wrong with it?
I can only speak for myself. I actually supported Trump’s tariffs the first time around. In fact, I wrote a column saying: Donald Trump is not the American president Americans deserve, but he is the American president China deserved.
Somebody had to call the game. So I have a lot of sympathy with that view at one level. The other thing I would say is: I will confess something here on your show. Whether I’m writing about China from Washington or whether I’m writing about China from China, I’m always just writing about America.
My goal is to use China as my permanent Sputnik. Helping people understand what a formidable engine this is — however they got there — and that if we aren’t serious, then we’re going to get steamrolled.
Here’s one of the things that I think deranges, a bit, the U.S. debate on China, which is that two things are happening at the same time that we are having trouble seeing simultaneously.
On the one hand, I feel like the conventional wisdom at the end of the Biden administration is: China is doing quite badly. They are not escaping the middle-income trap. They have not raised living standards in the way people thought they would. Xi’s “zero Covid” policies went on way too long and were authoritarian in a very extreme fashion. There was this state-sponsored crackdown on tech companies and a bunch of other parts of Chinese life. And there was a real feeling that America was in a stronger position, and they were in a weaker one.
The thing that was missed in that is the thing that you’re pointing out in some of these columns — that we imagine, because this is how it has worked here, that the sophistication of the economy and what it can create and the living standards that economy generates for its own people will be very tightly linked. So because their living standards have not advanced in the way we thought, I think a view took hold that the Chinese experiment was not working out.
At the same time, if you go and look at what they are creating and their factories and their industrial base, they are at the forefront of a series of technologies. They’re competing with us, within months, on A.I. — the A.I. timelines for the two countries are just months apart, if that. And then, as you’ve mentioned, they’re probably ahead of us, at this point, on batteries, electric vehicles —
Oh, not even close. Yes.
And on the ability to spin up highly complex supply chains.
I guess the question here is: How can those two things coexist in this way?
It’s a question I ask every trip and did on this one, as well.
The answer is a combination of things. Partly culture and partly just not understanding how the systems work.
Not in every case, but as a general rule: If you have an idea to start a company in China, there’s actually not a lot standing in your way. The government is not going to interfere with that. In fact, it may help you far more than any local, state or national government would do here.
But if you want to write an Op-Ed piece condemning Xi Jinping, that will be the last Op-Ed piece you write.
So those two things are very decoupled there. Not only that, but China has a mandarin tradition, going back a long way. People who want to work in the government have to take a test, and it’s a very meritocratic test. And the product of that is — on the whole, as a generalization — the deep state there actually is pretty good and quite responsive when it comes to backing innovation. It’s also very good at arresting you if you get out of line. But that’s how these things go together.
So if Ezra does decide he wants to make that pink polka dot button that can sing the Chinese national anthem backward — not only can he get that button overnight, but no one will stand in the way. In fact, you may find a lot of sources of capital locally to produce that button.
At the same time, if you want that button to sing “Tiananmen Square in 1989” over and over again, you’re going to get arrested. But those two things actually exist side by side.
I think people are used to thinking about the pink backpack with a button. But they’re not used to thinking about the dark factory or the new Huawei campus.
What is a dark factory? What is it like to be in one? What was that Huawei campus that you went to like? And what did you take away from that experience?
Dark factories are fully robotized factories, so they’re dark. They don’t need to turn the lights on, except at two and three in the morning, when the engineers come in to clean the machines. And there are dark factories all over China today.
The Huawei campus was built in three years to house 35,000 researchers, including foreign ones whom they hope to recruit. There were a hundred different cafes. Each building was distinctly designed. There is a monorail going around a beautiful lawn campus.
By the way, I’ve been to Huawei’s headquarters in Shenzhen. I have no illusions about Huawei. I have written about them. They stole stuff. They have not been at all good actors. But we tried to kill Huawei in the United States. We tried to deny them the chips, and they almost went into the tank. And they innovated their way out. Maybe they stole those chips from Nvidia somewhere — I have no idea.
All I know is that the same day that Josh Hawley declared that China can’t do innovation, Huawei reported record profits on CNBC with some very new technology.
Again, my job is to take the world as it is. And the way the world is right now is: However China got there, it’s there. And if you don’t think it’s there, then you are really missing something.
That gets us to current policy. It’s very hard right now to podcast about trade policy. We’re recording this on Wednesday, April 9. It will come out Tuesday of next week. So God knows what will happen these next six days. If we had recorded this morning, it would have been a different podcast than it is now.
But after tanking global markets for a week, and then beginning to see the U.S. bond markets unravel, the Trump administration backed off and imposed a 90-day pause on tariffs on countries that have not retaliated, which is just a generally strange concept. But they also doubled down on Chinese tariffs.
China is retaliating against us. The Trump administration’s broad view, as articulated by JD Vance and others, is the center of their entire trade strategy has been that we need to build all this in America again — not amid all of our friends.
The Biden administration had a friendshoring strategy. But Howard Lutnick, the secretary of commerce, talked about his vision and that the way to do this is very high tariffs — incredibly high on China, specifically, but also, frankly, on the rest of the world. Because what you’re trying to do is bring it all back here. And that is a way of making us capable of competing with China.
There’s a series of papers out there that make this argument that China has a hegemonic level of dominance over global manufacturing. They’re not the only manufacturers, but they have primacy there. And we have primacy on the financial architecture of the world. And in this theory, what Trump and his team are trying to do is take manufacturing back from China.
Do you think their theory makes sense?
Hire clowns, expect a circus.
If that is your theory, then go ahead. Put all the tariffs a thousand percent on China. That’s Day 1.
But these guys are entirely first-order thinkers. Day 2 has to be a strategy for what you do here the morning after. How do you then build the industrial base that you want to take advantage of the time you’re buying with your tariffs?
So what are these guys doing? Trump put up a wall against China, and then they went out and shot the American car companies. Ford was just downgraded today. Its stock, I think, is down to $7.50. Why is that? Because Ford did everything that Biden asked it to do. That a rational company would ask it to do. That we would want it to do.
Then what does Donald Trump do? He comes in with his right-wing woke [expletive] and says: We don’t do E.V.s here. E.V.s are for girlie men. We only do manly industries.
Well, [expletive] that. OK? Because look what happens now to Ford.
So you say: We want to bring this here.
I don’t want to have my kids screwing parts into cars. I want them designing, investing in and inventing the next generation of E.V.s.
But let’s go back to that ecosystem I talked about: E.V.s, robots, autonomous cars, batteries, clean energy.
Before I came over here, I read that Trump wants to reopen coal plants. He loves “Drill, baby, drill.” So it doesn’t make any sense.
You’re building a wall against China. Great. I’m all for it. But what are you doing behind the wall so we catch up? You’re taking your own companies out and shooting them in the back if they’re not right-wing woke.
What is the Trump administration focused on? How many billions of dollars of research funds can they take away from American universities to punish them for D.E.I. strategies?
Now, I’m here not to advocate D.E.I., but if I had a limited time in the world right now, I sure wouldn’t be focused on that. I’d be focused on doubling down on the research capacity of these universities. I’d be doubling down on the National Institutes of Health.
What are they doing? They’re cutting the budgets of our crown gem research facilities.
So it’s all just [expletive]. They’re not serious people. They’re clowns.
But you are not all for building a wall with China. You are making an argument that, even among Democrats, I think is somewhat more subversive right now, which is that if you were a serious person, you would do with China what we did with Japan in the ’90s. Which is, by the way, when Donald Trump came up with all of his trade theories. This guy has had the same opinions on everything for decades and decades.
What we did with Japan is we brought their car companies here, and we learned from them. What China did with us was that they brought in our manufacturers, and they learned from them.
And what you are saying is: If you take seriously how good China has gotten at manufacturing, then what you would try to do is begin bringing its factories here as the condition of access to our market, so we can learn from them.
Exactly. You should do 50-50 joint ventures with Xiaomi. You can build your cars here. No. 1.
And No. 2, you have to build your supply chain here, as well. So you’re not just bringing all the parts in from China, but you have to build the supply chain and the factory here — joint owned. Exactly what you did to us.
I argued for this before with Huawei. Huawei has a very dodgy past. They’ve been involved in all kinds of lawsuits with different companies over I.P.
So what I said at one point was, I would say to Huawei: Here’s the deal. We’re going to let you wire Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. You can sell your technology in those three states. We’re going to watch you for three years. We’re going to see how you handle the data. If you do well, we’re going to give you other states.
We created no incentive for them to be a better actor. There was no ladder up or out at all. We then tried to kill them. And their response was: You talking to me? You talking to me?
And they now went out, got into the fitness gym, and they might kill us.
I’ve lost track of what the tariff is on China — we might be getting toward infinity. I have no idea. But if behind that is a strategy to do what we did the other way, I’m all for it.
But if the strategy is only to build a wall so we can go back to digging coal, to only depending on oil and to killing the wind business and the E.V. business, then this is going to end in such a disaster. That’s the immediate problem.
You have another problem coming down the road with A.I.
A.I. is going to be injected into everything. From your car to your toaster to your refrigerator, and maybe even your body. If we and China don’t have a trusted architecture for managing A.I., then everything is going to become TikTok.
And this whole debate we’re having over TikTok — can we have it? They’re listening to us. What are they doing with the data? That’s going to apply to your toaster, to your tennis shoes, to your car. So that’s coming down the road.
But that’s already here. They don’t allow our major technology firms there. And with the exception of TikTok, really, we don’t allow theirs here.
I always say that, with A.I. policy, there are three goals: Make it safe, make it faster, make it ours.
And “make it ours” is always the goal that wins. In every conversation in the Biden administration, in the Trump administration. Which means, by the way, we are racing much quicker than we should be to “make it safe.” Because “make it fast” then becomes the overriding objective.
So we’re already there. And you will sever these two A.I. branches off from each other. You’ve already, to a large degree, severed the two internets off from each other. You are going to have this world where you do bifurcate.
And there’s something interesting about that, too. We are probably, by most accounts, a little bit ahead of them on A.I., but not by much at this point. But they have something increasingly that we don’t. Which is a digitized structure for their economy and for the integration of their economy with manufacturing and other things, but particularly payments, communications, etc., that you could embed A.I. in very rapidly.
When Elon Musk talks about making the app formerly known as Twitter the Everything app, what he wants it to be is what China already has — which is these apps that do communications and payments and all these different things. And then if you embedded A.I. into them, which they’re doing, you have much more surface area of the economy that you can optimize very fast.
That was the theme of my column — that they have massively digitized. It’s a cashless society now. You have beggars with a QR code in their begging bowl.
I went with my colleague Keith Bradsher to Zeekr, one of China’s new car companies. We went into the design lab and watched the designer doing a 3D model of one of their new cars, putting it in different contexts — desert, rainforest, beach, different weather conditions.
And we asked him what software he was using. We thought it was just some traditional CAD design. He said: It’s an open-source A.I. 3D design tool. He said what used to take him three months he now does in three hours.
Three months to three hours! Because they have such a digitally connected system, you just take that hypodermic needle, fill it with A.I. and inject it, and it can optimize so many things.
It’s for all these reasons that I’m worried about the bifurcated world. I’m worried that world is not going to be at all stable or at all prosperous anywhere near the last 40 years.
So if I have a choice, my choice is to argue — and I don’t care if I’m the only one arguing for it — that we and China are going to have to get together and actually be the partners that create an architecture for this. Otherwise, we’re going to just keep racing each other in some kind of crazy A.I. version of nuclear, and probably bankrupt ourselves in doing it.
And this gets to my gut feeling about the whole world we’re going into once we get to A.G.I., which is that I think to manage this world — climate, A.I. and disorder — we are going to have to learn to collaborate as a species to a degree that we have never collaborated before.
I am a big believer in my friend Dov Seidman’s argument that “interdependence is no longer our choice. It’s our condition.” And that the only question is: Will we have healthy interdependencies or unhealthy interdependencies? We are going to rise together, or we’re going to fall together. But baby, whatever we’re doing, we’re doing it together.
That is my view.
I don’t know if that’s true, though. You’re much more of a student of international relations and history than I am. But countries can rise and fall separately. Superpowers decline, and others rise. Japan was going to be the next great power. Now it’s an aging society that is in much more trouble.
One of the ways of thinking about this that has been on my mind, watching the Trump administration light the confidence the rest of the world has had in America on fire and call it greatness is this idea that China’s strength is manufacturing, and America’s strength, which we deride, is financial.
One of the lessons of all history is: He who controls the financing controls the world. And what the Trump administration thinks it’s doing is taking back manufacturing from China. I don’t think it’s going to do it, but what they’re definitely going to do is make it possible for China to take a financial share from us because people are not going to trust us anymore.
If we can tariff them at any moment and will at any whim, they will try to unwind themselves from being part of our architecture of financial dominance. And it is an extraordinary source of American power, but if you use it too much, then people will voluntarily release themselves from it, because they’re voluntarily part of it.
China has very sophisticated payment structures. It has the capacity to lend a lot of money. It is playing itself up right now as a more stable player in international affairs. It is trying to create closer relationships with Europe, Japan, South Korea and a lot of people and countries that it has traditionally had very rough relationships with.
So I don’t think we’re necessarily going to rise and fall together. If you told me that Trump was a Manchurian candidate and you had evidence of it, it would be very hard for me to refute. Like, what would the Manchurian candidate do, if not this? [Laughs.]
Right? [Laughs.] Let’s go back to: What would you be doing if you were serious on trade?
The first thing you would be doing is saying to the Chinese: You now manufacture about one-third of all products in the world. That is not sustainable.
You can’t make everything for everyone. You have got to leaven out your economy. To be retired in China is to get a $5 a month pension. And you’ve got to be using that energy domestically and buying more from others.
The conversation has to start there. They are making too much, and we are consuming too much.
So why don’t we get our friends to sit down with China as a united front — the European Union, Korea, Singapore, Japan, the Philippines — and make it the world against China on this issue?
You would have told them: Over the next three years, we’re going to gradually be raising tariffs by 15, 20, 30 percent each year. So you can know what’s coming. But we’re going to keep doing that as a collective.
And then behind that wall, you would be offering them, one, the opportunity to invest in America. And two, you would be serious about that ecosystem I talked about and giving our government and our companies incentives — doing everything we can to get the infrastructure and opportunities for that ecosystem to get going. That would be the rational thing.
What did Trump do? He made it America against the world. The whole world at the same time. So he actually threw away our single greatest competitive advantage over China — which is that we have allies and China has vassals.
I want to note something that I think is a useful way of thinking about trade here. I think there’s been this problem that people keep trying to illustrate a more sophisticated architecture around Donald Trump’s thinking than is actually there.
Yes.
And one of the things they’ll reach for is this issue with China. China makes about a third of the world’s goods, as you mentioned. They’re on track to make about 45 percent of it in the 2030s. And if I’m remembering the number right, I think they account for something like 12 percent of consumption.
Yes, 12, 13 percent.
That’s hugely imbalanced. For a country that big to be that imbalanced between production and consumption creates an instability across the entire global system.
One of the completely idiotic things that even skeptics of our relationship with China have been appalled by, that the Trump trade effort has attempted, is to treat everything in terms of bilateral trade between America and other countries, as if we should have a balanced trade account with Vietnam. What do we make with our advanced manufacturing that the Vietnamese are going to buy? It’s a completely insane way to look at the world.
But you do want to think — particularly for the very big players — about global imbalances. Because if there are huge global imbalances, not just individual bilateral ones, then you have a bit of a problem.
And this is where you might have imagined the world to put pressure on China. Not that they need to manufacture less, but they need to consume more. More of their manufacturing needs to be consumed domestically, and then more of their capacity needs to be shared with the rest of the world to maintain access to these markets.
But this idea that we’re going to infuriate every other country along the way — it’s just a very strange way to think about power. When your biggest fear is that China is becoming a compelling alternative to you, you’re going to make yourself a less compelling alternative to the rest of the world.
You have to understand: On my way over here, Trump decided he is going to pause the tariffs and whatnot. Lesotho doesn’t have to worry.
What he is missing is that the world, and China in particular, thinks he’s an unstable actor. They look at what’s going on here. They watched that Zelensky meeting in the Oval Office. They have watched that Trump tore up what was basically a successor agreement to NAFTA that he negotiated with our two closest neighbors. And they’re saying to themselves two things. One is: How does our leader even get in a room with this guy? We don’t know what he’s going to say.
And No. 2: Say we do an agreement with him — he could tear it up the next day.
He always thinks he’s being cute. Like he’s buying some apartment block on Long Island and he can kind of do whatever he wants. But this is a big game, and they don’t think he’s a stable actor anymore. There’s been a real cost for this back and forth.
Hey, I’m glad the stock market went back up. But don’t think this has been cost free.
I am livid about this particular thing. The White House press secretary said to the media: I guess a bunch of you didn’t read “The Art of the Deal.”
Oh, my God. When he did the 90-day pause, there was no deal. We didn’t get anything. Yes, we vaporized a huge amount of wealth. Yes, we have created a signal that everybody else should trust us less and fortify themselves against these tariffs coming back in 90 days.
Trump has become, himself, far less popular. We’ve put the financial system under a lot of strain. We have frozen a huge amount of future investment.
This idea that you act the madman in order to get these extraordinary concessions — we didn’t get any concessions. I guess maybe the idea here would be: We showed we’re serious, so people will come to us and offer — I don’t know, if you’re Vietnam — to buy more of our something.
We got nothing.
What we did was we lit a lot of our political and geopolitical capital on fire. And we are calling that a victory.
But also Trump has now shown that there is a place he can’t go. So his leverage over the rest of the world just diminished, because what the world just learned is that he actually can’t destroy his own bond market. So if he tries to do this again, and the world does not want to be pushed around by us, they can wait us out.
Now there’s a concentrating issue with China, and we’ll see how that plays out. But there was no deal made here.
There was, as you say, worse than no deal. We shot ourselves in both feet. And now we are in a much less powerful position because we’ve alienated all those allies we need to create leverage on China in the future. It’s an unmitigated disaster.
I want to pick up on the Washington consensus again. Because we’re talking about Donald Trump, and I think it’s fair to say we agree that his policies here are dumb and destructive.
But there is the issue of the consensus again. And even today, Gretchen Whitmer, the Democratic governor of Michigan — somebody many people think will run in 2028 — was out giving a speech and basically saying: Look, I don’t agree with how Trump is doing it. But in general, tariffs are important. We don’t produce enough here. We produce too much there.
I have talked to many Democrats who will say that they don’t agree with how Donald Trump is doing it, but that he’s sort of right about China.
And my worry, again, is that they are wrong. They’re trying to compete with the China of 15 years ago — when maybe you could have tariffed your way out of it.
The impulse Democrats have on China is to be Trump lite. There is no one making a case for openness. Even if you don’t believe in that case, I think it would be healthy for the debate, for some people — aside from maybe just you — to be making it. But also there’s no sense that the technology transfer might now need to go in the other direction.
And I guess the final thing that worries me is that there is the possibility for the relationship to call into existence the thing that it’s supposedly preparing for. Even during the Biden administration when they were beginning to build technological walls, a lot of the reporting I saw suggested, I think quite reasonably, that China understood that move as Washington coming to the view that it would try to force China’s progress to slow. That it would never allow it to achieve not even expansionary or hostile ambitions but just development at the frontier of technology.
And the agreement in Washington — that China should be treated as an antagonist — certainly has a possibility of making China more of an antagonist. Because, well, don’t they then have to treat us as more of an antagonist?
And I’m not trying to take responsibility off them. They have done plenty wrong there, too. But I worry that we are careening toward a world where the tit for tit and the tat for tat almost ensures a future of hostility, and neither side seems in any way interested in even defining what an offramp from that might look like.
Let me respond in two ways. I want to go back first to the point we were discussing about the unseriousness of this administration.
The morning after Trump announced he was putting this massive tariff on China, when the markets really melted down, I actually called our editors and said: Not the most important story of the day. Not the most disturbing story. Please don’t lose sight of this story. On the day before we learned — or it may have been the same day — that Laura Loomer, a conspiracy peddler who believes Sept. 11 was an inside job, was in the Oval Office.
And we have since learned, apparently or reportedly, she urged Trump to fire the head of our National Security Agency and his deputy — two of the most respected intelligence professionals in the world — because they weren’t pro-Trump enough. Who knows what it was. And Trump did that.
He fired two of our most important cyberdefenders and -warriors — widely respected around the world. He did that on the advice of a political witch doctor.
Holy mackerel. Market up or down, how can we be a serious country? Talk about things that then filter down. That then filter down through the whole bureaucracy. Can I offer up intelligence that Trump will not like?
Let me offer a useful comparison here.
Two years ago, when we were going through the decline in conventional wisdom about China’s prospects, one of the big things that was driving that was that Xi Jinping had embarked on a campaign of humiliating, firing and, it appeared, even sometimes disappearing members of the Communist Party and leading tech executives like Alibaba’s Jack Ma, who had displeased him.
And the sense from the outside was: China is weakening. Because the thing it has had, which is competent government that is willing to absorb internal disagreement and wants to see its top entrepreneurs and C.E.O.s succeed, is collapsing into a peevish dictatorship.
Now Jack Ma is back in good graces, and Xi Jinping is trying not to destroy China’s tech sector and is giving warm speeches to rooms that include Ma.
But we are doing the other thing. Donald Trump, Elon Musk are on a campaign of retribution throughout the federal government, on a campaign of retribution against C.E.O.s and universities and members of civil society who have angered the administration.
It is we now who seem to not care about how competent people are or what success they’ve achieved or what kind of linchpin they are in our national strategy. We are doing the exact thing that, not that long ago, people like me were sharply downgrading their estimation of China’s future prospects. China has reversed course. But we’re just getting started with our cultural revolution.
On my trip, I can’t tell you how many people asked me: Are you having a Maoist cultural revolution of — my words — right-wing wokes?
Because what was the Cultural Revolution? It was Mao unleashing his ideological youth to tear apart the deep state in China. And it didn’t end well. It went on for a decade, and God knows how much it set China back.
So I just couldn’t agree more. It’s one of the things that so troubled me, watching this happen.
But I want to go back to your other point. I’m not running for office, but if I were running as a Democrat, I would not be doing Trump lite. I would provide this comprehensive alternative of leveraging our allies, setting down conditions — long-term tariffs on China, gradually implemented behind which we invest in the ecosystem of the 21st century with government help as much as we can. And taking a long view because we got into this the long way — we’re not going to get out of it the short way.
Well, it gets to a question I rarely hear asked, which is, What should the goal be? What is the aim of all this policy?
Most of the time, in a conversation that is quietly structured by this Thucydides trap idea — this idea that there can be only one — it’s that the goal of our policy is to make sure China, in wealth, might and strength, never surpasses us. The goal is to keep ourselves ahead or to keep them down, as opposed to the goal’s being our own strength and partnership.
And I think that you could listen to that and say: Well, wouldn’t that be naive to have partnership? But Europe’s strength isn’t bad for us. The fact that Novo Nordisk has created an extraordinary class of GLP-1 drugs is not a bad thing.
And honestly, I would like to be able to buy excellent, cheaper electric vehicles. I’ve never been particularly on board with the Biden administration’s tariffs on that. It has always seemed to me that this idea that you were going to choose, in the way they did, that your competition with China was going to completely overwhelm your electric vehicle transition, suggested maybe you were not as worried about decarbonization on the timeline as they said they were.
I recognize these are difficult choices, but they do reflect the question: Is the endgame here a relationship between two prosperous superpowers? Or is the endgame here that we are trying to isolate China and keep it from becoming the superpower it might otherwise be because we believe coexistence to be fundamentally impossible?
And I think if you are getting people to speak honestly now, what has most changed in the Washington conversation about the two countries is that almost all the key figures in Washington now believe the latter. They believe coexistence is impossible. So you are just in an all-out fight for power. And A.G.I. supercharges the need to win that competition because whoever gets to that first is going to have a huge advantage over the other.
It sounds to me like what you’re saying is the goal should be the other thing.
The goal should be the other thing. And I’m happy to be the advocate of it.
We just saw a little snapshot of what the other looks like. And I think we’re going to grind ourselves up. I think we’re going to make ourselves less stable, less prosperous and less able to manage the three key challenges of the 21st century — climate, a trust architecture for A.I. and disorder.
So I’m perfectly ready to be called naive, idealistic. But just don’t say I haven’t done my homework — because I have.
Let me ask, as we come to a close here: You’ve had two pretty significant trips to China in the last year. You’ve had many more behind that. On these trips, what was the thing you heard most that worried you most? What was the meeting you had or the thing you saw that shifted your perspective the most? What do those of us who have not been there in some time or have never gone — what are we not seeing or hearing?
I traveled with our colleague Keith Bradsher, who has been in China for 23 years. And we interviewed two professors who will go nameless — both super pro-American and who study the United States.
One of them told us that on his last trip to America, as he was leaving, he got to the gate and got pulled aside by what he assumed were F.B.I. officers. He was taken into a room: Give us your phone.
The other one, when he arrived, got pulled aside, taken into a room: Give us your phone.
And if that’s where we’re going, we’re going to a bad place. Because that word gets out immediately: Boy, the last time I was there, I got pulled aside by the F.B.I.
Then everyone says: I don’t want my kids to study there. I don’t want to travel there. I don’t want to do tourism there.
We’re going to make it a self-fulfilling prophecy. There’s a joke among the Chinese that the whole war — this is a little ethnocentric nationalism — the whole conflict is actually our Chinese versus their Chinese.
Henry Kissinger is a very controversial figure in history for all kinds of things, from the Cambodia bombing. But I would say he is missed right now in one sense: He was a Republican who understood the importance of this relationship. And his last book was about A.I., which he wrote with Craig Mundie and Eric Schmidt. The Republican Party has no credible authority figure right now that they have to listen to. So it becomes just this competition for who can outbash China. And that just doesn’t end well.
I can’t emphasize to you more, Ezra: When I go to China, I’m writing about America. I’m trying to hold up a mirror of what it looks like to be serious about that 21st-century ecosystem, and I’m doing it for my kids and my grandkids. And you can call me whatever name you want because I’m not listening.
Then always our final question: What are three books you would recommend to the audience?
Oh, I forgot. Oh, Jesus. [Laughs.] I had the good fortune of speaking at this conference with Yuval Noah Harari, and he was so good, because his whole talk was about trust and whether we’re going to learn to re-inject some trust into this relationship. So my thought is: I’ve got to go home and reread all of his books.
Tom Friedman, thank you very much.
Thanks, Ezra.
You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.
This episode of “The Ezra Klein Show” was produced by Rollin Hu. Fact-checking by Michelle Harris, with Mary Marge Locker and Kate Sinclair. Mixing by Isaac Jones, with Aman Sahota and Efim Shapiro. Our executive producer is Claire Gordon. The show’s production team also includes Marie Cascione, Annie Galvin, Elias Isquith, Marina King, Jan Kobal, Kristin Lin and Jack McCordick. Original music by Pat McCusker. Audience strategy by Kristina Samulewski and Shannon Busta. The director of New York Times Opinion Audio is Annie-Rose Strasser. And special thanks to Zoe Zongyuan Liu, Kyle Chan and Matt Sheehan.
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Ezra Klein joined Opinion in 2021. Previously, he was the founder, editor in chief and then editor at large of Vox; the host of the podcast “The Ezra Klein Show”; and the author of “Why We’re Polarized.” Before that, he was a columnist and editor at The Washington Post, where he founded and led the Wonkblog vertical. He is on Threads.
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