Today, H.R. McMaster previews an issue President Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping are likely to discuss when they meet in South Korea later this week. Niall Ferguson explores how the US and China are using their economic “chokepoints” to gain leverage over one another in trade and security discussions. And Belgium’s Princess Astrid and Minister of Defence Theo Francken visit Hoover and Stanford to bolster academic and trade ties as part of a wider tour of the Bay Area.
Determining America’s Role in the World
Belgium’s Princess Astrid and Minister of Defence Theo Francken brought a delegation of scholars, diplomats, business leaders, and military officers to the Hoover Institution earlier this month. Francken, Belgium’s minister responsible for foreign trade and a member of the New Flemish Alliance party in Belgium’s governing coalition, told Hoover Institution Director Condoleezza Rice that his coalition government, which features four different parties coming together, has brought the country stability at a time when uncertainty abounds in Europe. Francken visited Hoover alongside business leaders, scholars, and Her Imperial and Royal Highness Princess Astrid. The delegation was in the Bay Area meeting with leading Silicon Valley firms to generate bilateral investment and trade. Read more here.
Writing in The Atlantic as his new book hits store shelves, Senior Fellow Michael McFaul argues that the Trump administration is undermining all of America’s efforts that led to its success during the Cold War, when it had stronger alliances, a healthier, more open economy, ties to more robust international institutions, and a commitment to democracy and openness that shamed and embarrassed the Soviet Union on the world’s stage. Today, he argues, all of those principles are in retreat. “Today America faces a different kind of Cold War, one in which China plays a bigger role than Russia,” McFaul writes. “But these same four pillars will almost certainly determine the outcome. A prudent leader would reinforce them; Trump is bulldozing them.” Read more here.
US Defense
Writing for the Military History in Contemporary Conflict Working Group, contributor Ralph Peters writes about the new reporting restrictions imposed on journalists working at the Pentagon, which resulted in all but a few of them leaving the building indefinitely earlier this month. Peters argues this imposition amounts to a constitutional crisis and an overreach that removes the media’s basic ability to do its job. “Recent moves to make the press take what amount to a loyalty—and docility—oath and to accept the rule of apparatchiks whose qualifications are as questionable as their distaste for the American Way of government is palpable, appears to be part of an effort to bend our apolitical military to the current political winds,” Peters writes. Read more here.
Confronting and Competing with China
Writing in The Times (London), Senior Fellow Niall Ferguson rues the fact that China and the US are so tightly bound together economically that China can now weaponize its near monopoly on rare earth materials as the trade dispute between the two nations continues to cascade. In response to China’s restricting or adding new limits to rare earths exports, America can respond by restricting the sale of the most advanced semiconductors. Ferguson says there are new “chokepoints” that could arise even after these matters are settled. For instance, up to 700 US medicines use at least one ingredient solely sourced from China. Financial sanctions, long a relied-upon tool of US efforts, are no longer the only tool in the toolkit. Read more here. [Subscription required]
On his Substack, Senior Fellow H.R. McMaster tracks an upcoming meeting between US President Donald Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation forum in Gyeongju, South Korea on October 30. Fentanyl will be on the agenda. “Given the CCP’s failure to keep previous promises to curtail the shipments of fentanyl and precursor chemicals, President Trump will be skeptical about more promises and will want to see results,” McMaster writes. Major news outlets have reported on recent indictments pointing to significant involvement of Chinese nationals in organized fentanyl distribution within the US. And the precursor chemicals used to produce fentanyl keep coming. Read more here.
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