The planetary politics of Anne-Marie Slaughter

Below is a complete transcript of the live Sinica Podcast with Anne-Marie Slaughter.

Kaiser Kuo: Welcome to the Sinica Podcast, a weekly discussion of current affairs in China, produced in partnership with The China Project. Subscribe to Access from The China Project to get access to, not only our great daily newsletter, but all the original writing on our website at thechinaproject.com. We’ve got reported stories, essays and editorials, great explainers and trackers, regular columns, and, of course, a growing library of podcasts. We cover everything from China’s fraught foreign relations to its ingenious entrepreneurs, from the ongoing repression of Uyghurs and other Muslim peoples in China’s Xinjiang region, to Beijing’s ambitious plans to shift the Chinese economy onto a post-carbon footing. It’s a feast of business, political, and cultural news about a nation that is reshaping the world. We cover China with neither fear nor favor.

I’m Kaiser Kuo, coming to you today from lovely Madison, Wisconsin.

As listeners will know, once in a while, I like to invite somebody who is not a China specialist, per se, for an outsider’s view on China policy, ideally from an informed foreign policy insider.

Well, today I am really excited to have one on the show, Anne-Marie Slaughter, who is President and CEO of New America, a truly important public intellectual, and a former diplomat. Many of you will know that she served as the Director of Policy Planning at the State Department during the first Obama administration. She is the author of several books, including Renewal: From Crisis to Transformation in Our Lives, Work, and Politics, The Chessboard and the Web: Strategies of Connection in a Networked World, Unfinished Business: Women Men Work Family, and The Idea That Is America: Keeping Faith With Our Values in a Dangerous World. We will be touching on themes in many, if not all of these books, actually, and then some in the next hour. So, Anne-Marie Slaughter, welcome to Sinica.

Anne-Marie Slaughter: Thank you. I’m delighted to be here.

Kaiser: Anne-Marie, I want to start with an op-ed that you published in the New York Times that I read, and that really grabbed me last year. It was titled “It’s time to get honest about the Biden doctrine.” And it was published just about exactly a year ago at the time that this show will drop. Yeah, actually November 12, 2021. It laid out something more than just a critique of Biden sometimes competing in difficult-to-reconcile foreign policy priorities. It also really talked about a way of thinking about governance and international relations that, at least to me, seemed to kind of light a path forward. And it’s something that you actually elaborated on quite a bit in this excellent interview that you did with Noema Magazine, which I will be sure to link to. If I may characterize it, it’s a way to further cooperation on vital issues of planetary concern, and to do so even in times like these, where at the level of sovereign nations’ cooperation often seems near impossible.

So, this set of ideas is what I’d like to talk to you about first, but let’s start, as you did in that op-ed, with this emergent Biden doctrine and what it consists of, why his priorities are sometimes at odds or at cross purposes.

Anne-Marie: Well, the first thing I have to say is that the New York Times, of course, chose the headline. What I essentially said was that in Biden’s first year in particular, there was something for everyone. There was something for the China hawks, there was something for the middle class, there was something for Europe. The administration was not making hard tradeoffs in the sense of saying, “This is what we stand for, and people may not like it.” I think to the extent there is a Biden doctrine and it’s gotten more attention, I think, than other things he’s done, it is this idea of democracies versus autocracies. That is the battle of this century. Something I disagree with, but he is a deep multilateralist, not always through international institutions, but he does not do things alone.

He’s rebuilt traditional U.S. alliances and he’s forging new groupings. And all of that is around the need to uphold the values of liberal democracy and to do so broadly. And so, if there is a Biden doctrine, I think that’s the bumper sticker: Leading the world in a battle between democracies and autocracies. I will also say that leading the world part is very important. If you read the National Security Strategy, it is all about we’re back. We are back at the head of the table and we want to do things together, but we’re, if not in charge, certainly at the head.

Kaiser: The National Security Strategy that you just flicked at, you’ve also written about that in a recent piece, October 20th of this year. A lot’s happened between then and now. But one of the things that we both, sort of, probably took some consolation in seeing was the elevation of what you would call planetary concerns of global interest to all of us. Those are pretty obvious, I think, to anybody who’s been alive on this planet for a little while. First and foremost, global warming, but also pandemics and a whole bunch of other things. But a year now since you published that New York Times op-ed, we’ve seen a lot that has transpired. I mean, there was the, of course, the Russian invasion of February 24, the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The heightened tensions that we’ve seen over the Taiwan Strait, and a new probably harder-line leadership emerging in China.

I mean, I feel like, are we less able now to pursue these multiple objectives in this changed scenario? I mean, because in that same time, we’ve also seen, just to talk about the global warming portion of this, we’ve seen massive heat waves both in the U.S. and in China, and in Europe and in the U.K. We’ve seen Pakistan submerged, a third of Pakistan actually under water in these horrific floods. We’ve seen parts of Florida completely devastated by Hurricane Ian. And when I have tried in the past to push this idea that, hey, we are in a genuine planetary crisis, whether over the pandemic or over global warming, maybe going after China so vigorously on so many fronts seems like it makes badly needed cooperation impossible. I always get the same response, which is, we can walk and chew gum at the same time, right? I’m sure you’ve heard this too.

Anne-Marie: Yeah.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, to me, it seems like we’re trying to walk now and chew gum, and spin 17 plates and solve difficult differential equations all at the same time. And maybe I’m a little less optimistic that we can. Let’s talk a little bit about what you wrote about the National Security Strategy, because  — no surprise — China and Russia figure as these gigantic existential threats. But as I said, encouragingly you point out that they do elevate the urgency of these transnational issues. Is there cause for optimism?

Anne-Marie: I mean, there’s cause for optimism in the sense of turning the ocean liner or the oil tanker of American foreign policy, because the language really is historic, right? They really say, and this is the way I think about it, there’s geopolitics and there are global issues. It’s telling that they call them transnational issues because they still start with countries. If you start with countries, then issues like climate change or pandemics are transnational. They cross borders. I think of them as global or planetary because I’m looking at the world as a whole, but regardless of the labels, we’re talking about the same things. We are talking about climate, we’re talking about health. They include terrorism, they even include inflation, but these big global challenges. And they say those issues are equal to geopolitical issues, to the traditional great power politics.

And they really say they cannot be subordinated, which is very important. A year ago, what I said in that first New York Times speech, I had listened to Biden’s maiden speech at the UN General Assembly, and I said, he’s talking about all these issues, but fundamentally, he’s focused on great power rivalry, at that point, just China. Now he’s focused on China and Russia, but he’s saying he’s taking that on directly. What good does it do if we win or China wins, if the planet really, it won’t be unlivable, but it will be unrecognizable. That’s progress. But-

Kaiser: And there is a but.

Anne-Marie: There is a but. But you could say, “Look, this has to be sequential.” First you declare it and then you do something about it, to really organize ourselves as the U.S. government to make that true, geopolitics and global issues. Well, you have the State Department and the Pentagon, and they’re focused on geopolitics. Obviously, the State Department has functional areas around democracy, around health, around climate, but those are way underfunded and less prestigious than the big, to be the assistant secretary for Eurasia or for East Asia in the Pacific. So, there’s a lot of rebalancing there. USAID is not even a cabinet department. You’d have to lift that up. But then most fundamentally, and you sort of put your finger on this when you said “walk and chew gum at the same time” — yes, you can, but if they’re really equal, then you better be walking 50% of the time and chewing gum 50% of the time, right?

It’s gotta be 50/50, and there’s absolutely no way that is true. I would say, if you looked at the time diaries of our top foreign policy officials, I will guess that the war in Ukraine and China broadly take up 70%, 80% of their time. I mean, depending on a crisis in other areas. So, if there’s a particular crisis in Africa or Latin America, they will focus on that. So, to actually implement this new strategy, you need to make a lot of changes. And they’re changes institutionally and in hearts and minds, and in training because my generation’s been trained to focus on geopolitics, and the chessboard and the web. I said, “Yeah, those geopolitics are there and they’re really important.” But these other issues, these global planetary issues are, in the end, more important to our quality of security and well-being, short of a nuclear war, which, of course, could still happen, or a biological war. So, obviously you could have great power war, and that would be just as bad. But if you avoid great power war, then these global issues are bigger.

Kaiser: So, you offer a really helpful sort of a literal mnemonic in the kicker of that FT piece you talk about that it’s about money, mindset, and metrics. And by money, obviously, you mean sort of the funding, and we talked a little bit about that just now. Mindset’s super important. And metrics, what do you mean specifically when you say metrics? In other words, are there KPIs that we should be expecting from…

Anne-Marie: Yes. I mean, so again, they talk about these global challenges, but really what they’re saying is the United States is going to lead a global coalition to meet them. And that again is great. I want to give credit where credit is due, that they are elevating the idea that we should engage, again, with democracies and like-minded nations. The pandemic does not care what China’s political regime is, or any country’s political regime. What they didn’t say is, “We will commit to reducing our carbon emissions by X amount with these other nations by this date,” so that you could hold them to account. Now, they can say, “Well, but there’s Congress.” I understand that they did just get a huge victory with Congress, with the Inflation Reduction Act, which is actually the Clean Energy Act, and the support, the decarbonization of the economy.

But if you were really equally serious about global challenges, or if you were ready to be held to account, you’d have put down concrete markers on, we will have a global health network that works with the WHO, but that is anchored in the regions. And so, we will never again have this issue with vaccines. We will build medical capacity in the countries that didn’t get vaccines. On any of these issues, there are much more concrete goals that one can then be held to account for.

Kaiser: And it’s not just like-minded nations that we ultimately need to work with, right? That’s the easy part. Well, I can’t say what’s going to happen after 2024. Even the like-minded nations aren’t so easy to work with necessarily, depending on how November 24 goes. But it does seem like few people are really considering how all, well, first of all, how all this, sort of beltway China hostility lands on the ears of Chinese elites, even those who would otherwise, in other circumstances, be very happy to cooperate. They seem shocked that it might make collaboration, even for common good, kind of a tougher sell in Beijing. Let’s not focus on that right now. I mean, maybe we can come back to that, but I want to ask you actually whether you think anyone is wrestling seriously with the likelihood that, as you point out, some compromises will simply have to be made, some de-prioritization of national security goals.

I mean, when you talk about 50%, it’s not just like they’ll do the same thing but compress it into 50%. It will mean simply the de-prioritization of certain goals. I’m curious, what was, first of all, what was the reception to that piece? When you said really plainly, and this is the 2021 piece, I’m going to quote you here, you said, “Instead of competing with China today on one issue and cooperating tomorrow on another, Mr. Biden must prioritize competition on global issues and challenge other nations regardless of whether they are democracies, autocracies, or something in between to join in.” What was the response to something like this? Which seems eminently reasonable to me.

Anne-Marie: Well, when you’re a Democrat and you’re offering criticism of your own side, your own side doesn’t love it. I understand that. Again, I think the Biden administration has a very tough hand and they’re playing it as well as they can. I think they’ve handled the war in Ukraine as well as you could in many ways. Except, and this is the example, this is exactly the example that I’m talking about, if you’re thinking about global issues 50% of the time, then 50% of the people at the table on any decision are focused on those issues. Which means, at the outset of thinking about how to support Ukraine, you’re thinking about, you’re playing it out. It’s not hard to imagine you’re going to have sanctions on Russian oil, of course. And it’s not hard to know that Ukraine is one of the bread baskets of the world.

So, this is foreseeable that if you have conflict between Ukraine and Russia and then between NATO and Russia, and you use various measures that the rest of the world’s going to suffer, and Europe’s going to suffer. But Europe’s a lot more resilient than a lot of these other nations, and they are not represented at the table. And nobody is saying, “Hey, wait a minute, if we have a global energy crisis, that’s really going to make it harder to move to green energy.” Now, you might say that’s an opportunity for renewables, because the price of gas, of carbon fuel goes up, and so we can do that, but then you’d want to be saying, “And we’re going to put in place, we’re going to take advantage of this moment. We’re going to offer support for changing over to electric vehicles or whatever it might be.” And then really thinking about the food security.

So, where’s the food gonna come from? And how do we stockpile? And how do we do things? It’s not a criticism of how they’re handling Ukraine. I think they really are doing a great job. On China, yes, I think that the hawkishness is easy and lazy. I mean, not some, and China, as you just said, has evolved in ways that are very troubling. But we cannot solve any of these problems without China, and frankly without Russia, but absolutely not without China, and without India and the other countries who have not lined up, taken a position on the war in Ukraine.

Kaiser: You’re absolutely right. We should sit down at all these conversations and begin with, well, as you say, hydrocarbons and carbohydrates in Ukraine. Related to Ukraine and China. I’m sure you know Susan Shirk. I don’t know if you overlap.

Anne-Marie: Yes, I do. Oh yeah, absolutely. We didn’t really work together, but I know her as an academic.

Kaiser: Yeah. She’s fantastic. And she has a new book out called Overreach: How China Derailed Its Peaceful Rise. I interviewed her very recently about that book. It was a really terrific interview. She argued, though, toward the end of our conversation, that the Biden administration isn’t giving China due credit when it comes to the Russian war against Ukraine. I’m going to quote really quickly from what Susan said. She said, “We need to recognize and acknowledge when they do something right, for example, not assisting the Russians tangibly in the Ukraine war. Why are we not hearing from the administration acknowledgement of that? And try to keep them there in that position, obviously is extremely important.” Yeah, it seems like this is something that could maybe get them back to the table and see just China producing 85% of the world’s solar panels.

Anne-Marie: Absolutely.

Kaiser: Producing, actually, with more renewable energy than the rest of the world combined. I don’t know why we aren’t cooperating, but yeah.

Anne-Marie: Or celebrating, as I said, it is pretty impossible in Washington to say something good about China. And that’s a good example of, yes, from my point of view, even hearing the Chinese ambassador at the Munich Security Conference, the week before the invasion, I thought there was a lot in what he said that also emphasized the importance of national sovereignty that made clear that there were limits. Yeah, of course, everybody was talking about the partnership without limits with Russia, but he was not enthusiastic about the idea that Russia was going to invade Ukraine. And of course, as that has gone on, yes, China has its allies, we have our allies. And it’s very tricky when your ally does something that you really don’t like. I know there’s not a formal alliance between China and Russia, but still, they’ve created a partnership.

And so, yes, I think refraining in lots of ways from supporting them. And then, of course, actually telling Putin that this was going too far. We should be saying that we appreciate that. And I hope we’re working behind the scenes. We have a very capable U.S. Ambassador to China in Nick Burns.

Kaiser: Nick Burns. Yeah.

Anne-Marie: But on climate, why don’t we challenge China to a competition as to who can decarbonize faster? Why can’t you say to Congress, “Hey, yeah, there’s a race between China and us in this century, but it doesn’t need to be a toxic race or completely toxic.” I mean, yes, we’re going to disagree on the South China Sea, etc., but there are places where if we are driving toward decarbonization, toward a global health system, toward any of these things, then that is a positive competition. And then, yes, I think we could have vaccinated the world had we reached out to China. We would’ve had to navigate the fact that the Chinese vaccines were much worse than ours, but they were still better than no vaccines. But that we just, we’re not thinking that way.

Kaiser: Yeah. I mean, and part of the reason that the Chinese weren’t willing to accept help on vaccines was, of course, that they felt like there was so much opprobrium coming from the Trump White House. They just weren’t exactly in a mood to accept American cooperation at that point.

Anne-Marie: Well, that’s the thing. Yeah, as you point out, when you beat up on people all the time, it’s not all that surprising when then if you extend your hand, they naturally, or are either suspicious at best, and deeply resentful at worst.

Kaiser: Anne-Marie, I really loved your ideas about networked governance, how the need for us to think more globally is actually a kind of thinking locally. Can you explain how this works? Why globalism, in its best sense, is actually more like localism actually, and how this approach, this mindset, makes collaboration or cooperation possible, even across implacably hostile national borders, which you wish they didn’t exist, I wish they didn’t exist, but there they are.

Anne-Marie: I’ve been thinking about networks for 30 years. I wrote my first article on judicial networks in 1994, looking at how judges across borders had formed an informal network where they were friends, but they also traded opinions, and views, and supported judges in countries where the judiciary was under attack. And so, really, the simplest way to think about this is you can look at the world in vertical terms, and then you see the big powerful nations who are at the UN Security Council, and they’re the permanent members. And the UN itself is this thing floating above. It’s actually a building in New York, but conceptually, it’s this global governance system that floats above the nation states. And then you have many layers of governance. So, you’ve got global governance, you’ve got regional governance, you have national governance, you have state governance or provincial governance, and finally you get down to local.

The network view is a horizontal view. The network view is the internet, right? You just look at a map of an internet, and that is the world in the ways… mapped in the ways it’s connected, or not connected, rather than in terms of little colored squares, many of which were determined by colonial powers. It doesn’t mean power goes away. Power is still very much there. And again, think about the internet. You’re going to see a couple of portals with a gazillion connections. And then a bunch that have a medium number. You can see this on any social media network. And then a long tail of many nodes that have relatively few links or edges. But it is a much more horizontal view. If you think about global governance, local in network terms, I think about what I call impact hubs, which basically mean a hub that brings together state actors, international organizations, but also the private sector, the public sector, NGOs.

And imagine like the vaccines for… You needed the pharmaceuticals at the table, or you need the WHO at the table. You need big governments. But you also, you can’t vaccinate people unless you’re working with NGOs on the ground.

Kaiser: That’s right.

Anne-Marie: Who actually then engage locally. And that offers you an opportunity not to go up through these many levels, but to say, “Okay, here we are. This is our goal. You tell us what you think,” to the NGOs, and ideally the NGOs are local, “what needs to happen here? What is it that we have to overcome? What’s the best configuration? How can locals be involved?” And then, and this is really critical, when you have innovation at the local level, it can go quite quickly to a network and where you have a hub, and it can be disseminated.

It says, look, you can go up a level to global, but you’re not going up. You’re just creating a different kind of hub in a much flatter world. And the question, and this is an important question, “well, how do you design those networks?” Because if everybody’s connected to everybody else, it’s a mess, as we know, from our email. So, you need to really think about, who needs to be at the table? What’s the communication structure? Who needs to know what? But still there’s much, much, much more room for the local.

Kaiser: I remember in March of 2020, I saw this in action in these networks of existing networks between healthcare providers in China and the United States, with people in Italy as well, joining in during the early outbreak. I mean, I was able to join these Zoom panels where you had practicing doctors and nurses sharing their own experience with different COVID therapeutics, with different ways to diagnose quickly in the absence of reliable testing, all this stuff, just best practices for sitting positions and how often to… It was amazing. It gave me a lot of hope. I wonder, have people rallied to your call, though? I mean, because in a sense, I’m going to draw an analogy between domestic American politics and the problem that you’re facing, this kind of divide between what we should be doing, which is your globalism or local-style globalism, and great power politics, geopolitical framing.

It’s analogous to me that how we all know that the real pathologies of American politics need to be fixed at a local level. I mean, to get people to think about school boards and town council races, and mayoral races, state house races especially. But we know what they end up actually all voting on is these national level issues, these culture war issues. It’s about whether that school board member is pro or anti-choice, or their opinion on critical race theory or immigration. It’s insane, right? But I mean, it’s sort of an analogy. You want people to focus on these transnational networks and on problems that they can handle at the local level, but we’re constantly distracted by these great national security issues, right?

Anne-Marie: No, that’s right. There are plenty of people who think I’m a hopeless idealist. I started my career as an international lawyer, although I was actually a very realistic international lawyer, because my view was you had to marry international law and international relations, and you had to bring power into the equation. Again, I don’t think we can just ignore geopolitics. Russia has invaded Ukraine and wants to swallow it up. And we have to stop that, because if you can do that, the most fundamental principle on which the UN was built is destroyed. And so, when Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1991, I remember the shock of that. It’s like Iraq just said, “Okay, you’re really my country.” And the whole world gathered to push them out. I fully understand that many people can look at the U.S. invasion of Iraq later and say, “This was just as bad. You violated the UN Charter.”

We didn’t intend to conquer the territory. We broke the territory, which is its own very, very grave set of faults and it was illegal. I think we have to push back on Russia hard. As I said, I think the Biden administration’s doing a really good job. I think also any country that is breaking international norms, and yes, there’s a values-based part of it, we have to defend. And so, we do have, as China has gotten much more assertive, we do have to push back in various ways. I also think you have to understand, look, when we became powerful at the end of the 19th century, we wanted a much bigger place at the table, and ultimately, we succeeded Great Britain. And China reasonably wants a much bigger place at the table.

But I also think there’s the values-based part that says, we also have to fight for the rights of all people. But just to be clear, I absolutely agree, we need to keep the geopolitics as a 50% of what we do. And that’s what the National Security Strategy says. On the other side, there’s been a lot of movement. You now see people and planet centered X in many more places. If you read the Secretary General’s our common agenda, it’s about people centered politics. If you read the Rockefeller Foundations New Energy Alliance, it’s people and planet centered. And of course, as climate change gets worse and worse, the idea of planet centered, and then what’s our relationship to the planet is this is not some abstract ideal. This is essential. Where I think we can-

Kaiser: Sure. I mean, it’s in the sustainable development goals and all that.

Anne-Marie: Exactly. But where I think you can counter the cynicism is not to focus on the concepts, but to focus on results. Domestically, locally, the way you get people engaged is not to tell them that they should be locally engaged citizens because that’s what democracy requires. It’s to say, don’t you want to take charge of how your town is part of a problem or a solution in this global issue? How do we build resilience? You may disagree that climate change is caused by carbon, but you sure know that there are more floods, and you want to do that. How do we educate our children so that they can be competitive in this century? What are the digital skills? And that’s where, again, I think, both globally and locally, people respond to clear metrics and proof that you are making a difference.

Kaiser: So, we need-

Anne-Marie: And so, we have to shift out of this… I mean, I was an academic for many years. I love concepts, but that’s why I emphasize metrics. It’s time to set really concrete goals and see if you can deliver. And then I think people feel empowered.

Kaiser: What examples of success can we point to? I’m constantly being asked about how to promote subnational collaboration across the U.S.-China divide right now. And besides being able to point to California and its climate cooperation initiatives under the UC system, or under Governor Brown, or under Governor Newsom, what are some other examples that you’ve seen where this is in action? It doesn’t have to be U.S.-China even, but where subnational level cooperation has transcended a difficult politics?

Anne-Marie: Well, so the best examples are cities, city networks, and they certainly include lots of Chinese cities. The C40, which is originally this big mayors of 40 big cities who have undertaken their own emissions’ commitments in lots of ways, and who are now working on how you use data better, and I think, and equally important in the pandemic. But there are bigger ones. I mean, that one is the C40. There’s also a Global Covenant of Mayors on energy and climate. That has 7,000.

Kaiser: Oh wow.

Anne-Marie: 7,000 may be too many. But the U.S. just appointed the first ever special envoy for subnational diplomacy. A woman, Nina Hachigian, who used to be the ASEAN ambassador in the Obama administration. And her job is to work with cities. She was the Deputy Mayor of Los Angeles for international affairs. It’s to work with cities in this country, but also around the world. So, absolutely, if you could talk to Shanghai, if you can talk to Wuhan, if you can talk to Beijing, but further out, that’s a way of, again, saying let’s focus on concrete outcomes. And mayors do focus on concrete outcomes more because the trash has to be picked up. And so, you can talk about what are you’re doing about landfills. And you have to again, build resilience to flooding or heat waves. So, there’s a lot there in the city networks that I see.

The university networks are deeply affected by our visa policies, which are really bad, right? We’re making it very hard for foreign students to come. And we are unduly suspicious, of course, of many, many Chinese-Americans. I think, though, so I would look at cities, I would look at university networks. There used to be NGO networks. I think those are probably much reduced, but I would look at places where you have the same role.

Kaiser: Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of the reduction in the NGO networks is China’s doing. China is obviously one of the… Their behavior has not helped an awful lot with this problem with the sort of pervasive bipartisan hawkishness and this singular national security focus that’s there in D.C. I mean, on the U.S. side of things, though, is there something other than Chinese perfidy that is driving this kind of, well, what I would call groupthink. You flick at something that I think is kind of interesting here. And maybe I’m reading too much into this, but just knowing some of the things that have concerned you, you’re very interested in diversity. You’ve written a lot about women and the challenges of career and family. You talk about Biden and his foreign policy team, describing them in that piece from last year as a tight-knit band of brothers.

Knowing what I know about you, I can’t help but thinking that that word choice was pretty deliberate, and that you mean to say something about the very kind of maleness paleness and staleness of the Tony Blinken, Jake Sullivan, Kurt Campbell, and, of course, the president himself. Is that part of the pathology or am I wrong in thinking that?

Anne-Marie: Let me start with the first part of your question, which the group think. The group think is partly because of the nature of the group. Yes. There are not a lot of contrary views there. And I’m not going to say putting more women in automatically changes it. I would actually say we need people who look like the country. And Asian Americans broadly, and Chinese Americans are big part of that diversity. I would like to see the principle that all those teams look as much like the country as possible, and not in aggregate, but in specific. I also think, though, and here I get it. There are iron laws of politics in this town, and Biden has a whole domestic agenda, and he got an infrastructure bill through. Hallelujah.

We’ve been trying to do this for 20 years. I remember living in Shanghai from 2007 to 2008, and taking the fast train to Nanjing, and thinking at that point, 2007 seven, this is better than any Amtrak train I have ever ridden on. And then we’re not even talking about the maglev or something fancy. We’re just talking about the train for Shanghai to Nanjing. He had to get that through, and he is harnessing the one place he can get bipartisan support, which is to be hard on China. And that’s been true in other areas too. So, that’s a part of it is just, “I don’t want to do this, but I’m constrained by domestic politics and this is the lever I’ve got, and I’m going to pull it.”

Kaiser: You think in his heart of hearts, he would prefer not to have to go so hawkish?

Anne-Marie: I do. I think there are a number of people. I think that’s probably true of Jake Sullivan and Tony Blinken, and maybe Kurt. Yes, I think that look, they got where they are because they know how to live within the constraints of politics. I respect that. I still think, though, this is just such an easy trap to fall into. Think about how we do with sports. It’s us against them. That gets everybody’s blood up. And it can motivate in positive ways. That’s why I don’t understand why we don’t try for positive competition. Yeah, but this is a president also who was formed in an era of two superpowers. Joe Biden’s older than I am, but he’s same generation in the sense of I went to college in the 1970s.

I was a young adult in the 1980s. So, my formation was much more the Cold War world, those first 30 years of my life. And then the second 30 have been post-Cold War. So, a world in which there are two superpowers and it’s you against the other big nation is a very familiar position to be in. And then you say, “Yes, and we represent the free world.” And that’s the democracies. And there are autocracies rising. I mean India, the Indian government is… It’s not the Chinese government, but it’s engaged in some really nasty practices. And a lot of the things the Chinese do are awful, certainly in Xinjiang.

Kaiser: Certainly.

Anne-Marie: There aren’t the checks that they’re ought to be to say, “Hey, wait a minute, if we keep doing this, this is going to torpedo our ability really to make progress on those other issues.” Because it isn’t enough to walk and chew gum. It’s not enough to have John Kerry broker something with a Chinese representative at COP while we are busy saying that China is engaging in all sorts of nefarious practices. You have to actually say, if this were the top of our agenda, what are we willing to compromise to get there?

Kaiser: You brought up sports analogies and I’ve got a lot of them that have come to mind of late. Ali Wyne was on this program talking about… He opens or there’s a chapter in his recent book on sort of great power. The Great Power Opportunity, he calls it. He talks about how his swimming coach told him, “You swim hard. You can’t constantly be looking at the other guy in the other lane.” And Ryan Hass has another one, I think, which works well, which is, in this race, we should focus on running faster and not trying to trip the other guy. But I feel like we are basically, not just trying to trip the other guy I mean, I feel like we can go ice skating and I feel like we are doing a Tonya Harding on China’s Nancy Kerrigan sometimes.

Anne-Marie: Oh dear. I don’t know if I’ll go that far. I love Ali Wyne’s book. I blurb it. I really think it’s a very creative way of saying, yeah, there are great power politics, but let’s see. There is an opportunity here. And I haven’t heard Ryan Hass’s, but I would say, both of them, and many of the China experts in this town are really uncomfortable with how far it’s gone. And there again, if that’s true, even here, you can imagine across the country. I don’t if we’re actually, if it’s a Tonya Harding situation, but it is definitely a situation where we are focused more on the competitor and what we get out of that competition, which again, remember, that’s the military budget, right? These things are connected. Who needs what modernized and how do we build the next generation of weapons?

And for the tech companies, this gives us a leg up on AI if we say we’re competing with the big three Chinese, tech companies in the Chinese government, and the way it marshals data. So, it’s connected to a whole system of interest as opposed to saying, and this is where I’m really just trying to hold the administration to account for its own words, which I applaud, if you really think that climate change and global pandemics, of which there will be many, food security, and water security, and terrorism, if you think those issues are as important as our rivalries with other great nations, then imagine what you’d have to do if you put those things first. That would give you a very different China policy. It would probably tell you to stop focusing so much on democracies versus autocracies and talk to nations about, and parts of nations. So, if you can’t get along with the national government, you go to others. But how are we moving forward? And I would look at the whole sustainable development goals because if you do those, you will get there by 2030. Which nation can contribute to doing the most on those goals?

Kaiser: Anne-Marie, you often talk about the younger generation and the hope that you invest in them. I’m definitely the same way. I’m constantly dazzled, not only by the sheer savvy of these kids, but the kind of wisdom in a lot of these Gen Z kids. I’ve got an 18-year-old and a 16-year-old. And maybe they’re not perfect examples of what I’m talking about, but I’ve been blown away. Sorry kids. But no, I mean, I feel like they have this real courage of conviction and this kind of willingness to jettison old ways of doing things. What are you seeing that gives you hope that they’re not going to swallow this new Cold War rhetoric when it comes to China specifically? That they’re willing to prioritize planet over geopolitics?

Anne-Marie: Yeah. Well, the first thing I have to say is the young people in the United States are going to grow up in a country, or come of age, really, in a country where there is no white majority, and that’s going to change a great deal. It’s going to take a long time for the power structures to reflect that new population. But by 2027, Americans under 30, there will be no white majority. So, that means they are in a very different environment. And there are lots of Chinese-Americans and there are people who were… Little Chinese girls who were adopted, who are fully American, but nevertheless have a tie to Chinese culture. I mean, I was introduced to Chinese culture by my Belgian grandfather who adored Tang and Sung ceramics, and which are some of the most beautiful ceramics anywhere. They’re just spectacular.

Kaiser: Couldn’t disagree. Yeah.

Anne-Marie: Lots of people in this country will have a different direct relationship to China and lots of other young people will have Chinese American, or again, even more broadly, Asian-American friends and contacts. And that’s important because, again, you… The othering of us versus them is a whole lot easier when the us looks all one way and the them looks all another, and that will not be true. I also think, though, even more important, this generation has grown up with the web view of the world. They are in the digital world. This idea that you can be as separate as that old MAP mix. I remember taking our sons when they were about eight and 10 to Berlin and showing them the Berlin Wall, or the remains of it. They were, of course, not there.

And they couldn’t understand how a wall could do anything. They were like, “Well, but you’d still be in touch with everybody on the other side of the wall.” And they weren’t thinking about the splinternet. They just, if their world is connected, and that gives you a planetary perspective. It really does. I mean, you have Facebook friends all over the world that you’ve met in various ways, or you are consuming K-pop, or the way that we’ve globalized means, I think that it’s, they just don’t see that map of multicolored squares in the same way that we do. I don’t want to overplay that. And frankly, they’re the ones who are going to suffer. I look at my sons who are 24 and 26 and worry a lot about, what happens when they want to have families? And what are they going to think about their children? And where are they going to live?

Kaiser: Yeah. We have a lot to answer for in our generation.

Anne-Marie: We do. And my sons are very good at pointing that out.

Kaiser: But in their case, mom is really doing something about it. I mean, really-

Anne-Marie: Well, I try, but we certainly, we could have done a lot more in the 1980s.

Kaiser: Anne-Marie, just now you talked about the non-white majority country in which our children will be raised. It brings to mind an episode that you were involved in, not directly, but there was a New America event in April, 2018. You were in conversation then with Kiron Skinner, who had your old job as director of policy planning at the State Department. She made headlines with a comment about China suggesting that unlike with the Cold War with the Soviet Union, which she described as a fight within the Western family, when it came to China, things might be much worse because, quoting her, “It’s the first time that we will have a great power competitor that is not Caucasian.” Now, that may be obviously factually wrong.

Anne-Marie: Yes. What about Japan?

Kaiser: Yeah. What about Japan? Exactly. But I’ve often wondered whether she wasn’t actually making a different point that it might be that she met… There might be an element of racism informing our hostility toward China. Do you think that’s a more charitable interpretation or too charitable interpretation of what she said? Do you think…

Anne-Marie: I think that’s interesting. I like Kiron. And I had invited… I’ve known her for years. We were graduate students. She’s younger than I am, but roughly contemporary graduate students. I invited her to the Future Security Forum because she was a successor in policy planning. She’s the first African American Director of policy planning. And so, I had no intention of playing gotcha. That was not the point.

Kaiser: Oh no, yeah.

Anne-Marie: I think what happened is that’s not how people in the room heard it. It was immediate. Partly, people were like, “Wait a minute, that’s not true. What about Japan?” But partly, it did sound like, well, they’re different because they’re Asian. And so, she never got a chance to explicate further. And it, of course, blew up very, very quickly because it was a classic example of being caught in a soundbite that you may not have meant that way. And even if you sort of did, you didn’t have any chance to elaborate on what was going on. I think what happened is that people thought, okay, this woman is on the inside in the Trump State Department. This must be the view of the Trump State Department that this is an Asian enemy. I don’t have any reason to think that that was true and that that was what she was voicing. I’m just sorry for the incident because she certainly paid a price for it.

Kaiser: Yeah. So, I’m now even more confirmed in my belief that what she meant to point out was that race plays a role in our attitudes toward China, which is in nowhere in greater evidence than in the Trump State Department.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

Kaiser: I think that, yeah.

Anne-Marie: Again, that is so many of the U.S.’s issues right now are exactly that we are a white majority country that is becoming a plurality nation. And there is no democracy that’s ever done that. And there are a lot of people who feel like they’re going to lose. And a lot of that is based on race. Not all of it. There are a lot of other issues, but you’re crazy if you don’t stare that in the face.

Kaiser: A theme that has developed in recent years that we’ve talked about, I’ve talked about with Ryan, who had this fantastic quote on the show. We talked about how, he said, “China has become the policy equivalent of duct tape. If you need to give the UN a purpose, talk about China. If you need to build infrastructure, talk about China.” We flicked at that earlier. His was a funnier quote. What we’re lacking is, I mean, to bring a, I mean, we just were talking about policy planning, a close colleague of mine, Jessica Chen Weiss at Cornell, who’s a wonderful, wonderful scholar, and has been writing a lot recently. She’s been talking about the lack of an affirmative vision for the kind of power that the U.S. wants to be in the world. Yeah, and so I feel like you are part of this project of moving us toward something like that. I want to just give you a chance to sort of, if you had your druthers, what kind of an affirmative vision would you like to see the Biden administration articulate? I feel like you sense, and I do, that they’re moving toward that.

Anne-Marie: They are. They are. Oh, well, I’m glad you raised that. I don’t know Jessica Chen Weiss. I read her piece in the New York Times recently and loved it. And she definitely ended pretty much where I am on, there’s just so much more we could be here. I think I see a country in this century as we become a plurality nation, that instead of just having this deep transatlantic connection, which we’ve always had, if you look at flows of everything, of education, of finance, of foreign direct investment, of trade, the lines between the U.S. and Europe are the thickest. And that’s obvious because that’s where the vast majority of Americans came from. And where, in terms of where you send kids to school and where you decide to invest abroad and trade, you go back to the old country. Well, now that’s going to be Latin America, 30% to 35%.

That’s going to be both African-Americans, but also the whole new gen… I mean, African Americans who are descended from enslaved people, but who many of whom are now going back to Africa, who feel more at home and feel like… Not that they come from a very different culture, but they can trace their ancestry back. So, I see us and Asia, and as opposed to the trans-specific relationship being about enmity, which it was first with Japan, and now with China, actually seeing, again, particularly on our West Coast, but throughout the United States, we are the nation that reflects the whole world. And we are the nation that can connect the whole world in meeting the global challenges of this century. That again, does not mean you don’t change governments overnight, and you always will have people who whip up rivalries often to stay in power domestically, but for many reasons.

But still, this vision of a country, as I said, we reflect the whole world, and we have the potential to lead in a very different way, much more sort of in a more horizontal way, in a more… leading from the center. But I don’t even think of that. I think of multi-hubs. So, I don’t think of the U.S. at the center of this grand global network, I think of multiple hubs, and the U.S., in our glorious diversity, playing a whole host of different roles that really do help us collectively meet these global challenges, or simply achieve the world that our values are universal. The Declaration of Independence doesn’t say all Americans are created equal and are entitled to these rights and protections. It says all humans. Well, it actually says all men, but I updated it.

Kaiser: Close but no cigar. No, I think that was a wonderful articulation of something I can absolutely get behind. I mean, this is why I teared up at the 2016 National Convention.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, I did too.

Kaiser: This was that vision on display, that open, diverse, tolerant America. I always believed America can be the first, I mean, the first state to define itself by its utter absence, its repudiation of ethnonationalism.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. Wouldn’t that be something? Exactly.

Kaiser: Yeah. Wouldn’t that be something? All right. So, I got just a couple more questions for you, but I mean, I could talk to you for hours. I’m just going to have to pick and choose here, but after thousands of conversations that I’ve had about the U.S.-China relationship, so much of it just seems to boil down, to me, to just a couple of key questions. And I’m really curious to see how you, again, as a seasoned foreign policy analyst with some distance from these issues, how you are inclined to answer. The first, I suppose, is what does China actually want? And to maybe make that a bit more manageable, do you see Beijing as seeking to overturn the rules-based international order or just to change parts of it? Do you see China as seeking global hegemony or something more like regional dominance? Right size it. We are constantly talking about right sizing China’s ambition.

Anne-Marie: Yeah. Again, you started this by saying I’m not a China expert. I do not speak Chinese. I have great reverence for Chinese culture, and for particularly, again, quite early Tang, Sung, Yuan, others sort of pre-Ming, I would say, but I’m not a China expert. And then the first thing, when you say, “What does China want?” I think it’s crazy. There is no one China. There may be what Xí [Jìnpíng 习近平] wants. I think there has been a tremendous suppression of internal dissent just over the last 20 years. When I was in China in 2007, 2008, I could have conversations with lots of people that I could not talk to in the same way today with those people, and maybe even not when those people are here. So, there’s been a tremendous tightening.

Kaiser: Absolutely.

Anne-Marie: Even with that. I think there are many, many, many Chinese and important Chinese people who probably disagree with the way this is going and who are more supporters of Dèng Xiǎopíng’s 邓小平 opening world than they are the closing off. And the COVID policy is such a concrete example. I mean, the COVID policy is the equivalent of the 1492 or ‘93 decision to abolish the navy that had reached all around the world and to close China back off from the world. I don’t, though, think, even at the most extreme, I don’t think China wants global dominance. China has never wanted global dominance. China has wanted tribute and respect. I mean, the idea that it’s the middle kingdom, again, in my world, this horizontal worldview, yeah, it wants to be at the center of things.

It wants people to give it a lot of respect. The century of humiliation, I think, is real. I always ask Americans, I say, “Look, imagine if we’d lost the Cold War, if we’d been the superpower.” This is more about Russia, but China has had some similar things in its history. So, we lose the Cold War, and we were this grand superpower, and then suddenly, we’re a power of such little consequence, nobody even talks about us at international relations’ conferences, which was true of Russia for about 15 years until Putin really did put them back on the map. And I think China, similarly, feels like we are this great civilization. We were inventing all sorts of things with lots. The Americans were in a very different place. And of course, there were not European Americans there. I think they do have a very different view of sovereignty, and they do not accept universal values, and they do not accept individual rights in the same way that the United States does and many countries in Europe do, even that they’ve signed up to.

I think there is room for many more communal approaches in the way the United States does things. But I do think a China that could design global institutions the way it wants, and even regional institutions, there’s a lot to push back on that I would push back very hard on.

Kaiser: Yeah, absolutely.

Anne-Marie: I don’t think China wants to be the United States, I think, or at least not the United States in our most maximalist moments. But I think it does want full respect as the United States’ peer. I think it’s our peer in some ways, but in many ways not. But I think that’s the wrong way to look at the world.

Kaiser: So the second question is very much related to this because it’s about what the United States can tolerate or what it ultimately wants. Let me borrow something that Larry Summers once said. This is actually a quote in a piece by Adam Tooze, where I first saw it. He said, “Can the U.S. imagine a viable global economic system in which it is no longer the dominant player? Could an American political leadership acknowledge that reality in a way that permits negotiation over what such a world would look like?” Maybe that’s a little convoluted, but “Can China be held down without inviting conflict?” Is how he ends.

Anne-Marie: Well, and I don’t think it’s just China. I was in Kenya two weeks ago, and I’ve been talking to lots of people through UN work. And what I hear everywhere is we are the global majority, and that that is low- and middle-income countries, and China is still a middle-income country, barely.

Kaiser: Barely.

Anne-Marie: And they’re saying, “We’re done with being ruled by 12% of the world’s population.” It really isn’t just making room for China. It’s making room for the world, and where we profess universal values and we profess multilateralism, but we want to keep control of the reigns. So, I think the United States, to play not the leading role, but certainly a critical leading role in this century, needs to make room for all sorts of people. We need to abolish the insanity of having only an American or a European at the head of the World Bank or the IMF. And I think we need to overhaul the Security Council. Yes, if we can’t imagine a world in which, again, we are a critical leader, but not the indispensable nation, things will go very hard with us.

Kaiser: And that brings us full circle to where we started talking about your planetary politics. I mean, because when you talk about the mindset, that is the first thing that really needs to change, right? Dialing down that sense of, well, exceptionalism and that American hubris.

Anne-Marie: I mean, look, I think we’re exceptional, but I think we’re… I mean, first place, France thinks it’s exceptional, China thinks it’s exceptional. I mean, it’s not just us. But I want to be exceptional for being exactly that country that reflects the whole world, just the vision you were talking about, where if we really could live our civic values, that that is what unites us as a nation. And in addition to reverence for the beauty of this country, for the dynamism of this country, there are many wonderful things that I love about this country, but none more than the diversity. When I walk down the streets of cities here, and actually often in the country, because you’ve got people who moved all over, I glory in the fact that I see people who don’t look like each other. I love Europe, but it’s still very, very homogenous.

And I think that’s what the human race is about. And so, from a planetary point of view, it’s always, when seeing the planet from space when we saw ourselves as a planet. We’re all going to go under if there’s climate change, or I just finished reading To Paradise, Hanya Yanagihara’s new novel, which is an imagination of this century as a series of pandemics and what it does to democracy. Because people are afraid they’re going to die, and suddenly nothing else matters. We’ve got to think that way or our way of life will not survive any more than it would survive if we were conquered by China.

Kaiser: Well, Anne-Marie, what a fantastic conversation and what a compelling and really kind of moving set of ideas that you’ve presented here. If you decide to run for office one day, give me a call.

Anne-Marie: I’ve been off and asked that, and I say, “If we could overhaul the American political system, I might have considered it.” But at this point, I hope to articulate the vision and do whatever I can to actually bring it about. There are lots of ways through influence and through writing, but also through action.

Kaiser: Yeah. Fantastic. Let’s move on to recommendations. First, a very quick reminder that if you like the work that we’re doing with the Sinica Podcast, the best way that you can help us out is to subscribe to The China Project’s Access newsletter. One of the things that it gets you is early access to this show. You can download it on Monday, rather than having to wait until Thursday, like all those other poor schmucks. So, yeah, please subscribe and help us out. You know that we’ve been under assault, Marco Rubio and Chris Smith have decided that we’re some kind of Chinese influence operation and are going after U.S., so we need all the help we can get. All right, let’s move on to recommendations. Anne-Marie, why don’t… I mean, first of all, I’d love for you to expound a little bit about that novel, To Paradise, and then if you have another recommendation, throw that in as well.

Anne-Marie: Oh my goodness. Yes, it’s an amazing novel. I’ll just say Hanya Yanagihara’s novel, A Little Life, was one of the best novels I’ve read in the last 20 years. So, I was very enthusiastic when this one came out. And this is, it’s set in, let me get this right, 1893, 1993, and 2093.

Kaiser: Wow.

Anne-Marie: And each one is an imagination of a different settlement to the Civil War in 1893. It’s the real 1993, but she focuses it on Hawaii in very interesting ways. And then the 2093 is a must reading, that along with Ministry for the Future, which lots of people have read.

Kaiser: Yeah, I love that book.

Anne-Marie: But you need to read those together because they… Stan Robinson offers more of solutions. This is more dystopian. I totally recommend those. But the last thing I’m gonna recommend, you said to me, “Who am I when I’m not a foreign policy expert?” I am a passionate birder. Over the course of the pandemic, I went from really liking birds to, as my husband says, “You’re going to turn into one of those weird little old bird ladies with a strange hat.” And those binoculars, I walk around with my binoculars all the time. I would recommend What It Feels Like to Be a Bird by David Sibley. It came out about a year ago. It’s a way of introducing you to the just phenomenal variety of what are after all, kind of hollow-boned feathered dinosaur descendants. And that’s a pretty cool thing.

Kaiser: It is. I mean, I’ve seen a couple of my friends over the years turn into birders. It’s obviously pretty compelling. I mean, they take such joy in it and it’s pretty infectious, so I can see-

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s like mindfulness, because when you’re looking for a bird, or you’re hearing a bird, all you think about is the bird. It’s not like you’re hiking, where your mind is running. You are focused on this bird, and it makes you so attentive to just the wondrous variety of nature.

Kaiser: Fantastic. Thanks. What a great recommendation. I’m going to put a little life on that list too, and To Paradise.

Anne-Marie: Yeah, it’s so good.

Kaiser: And being a birder. And yeah, so What Does It Feel Like to Be a Bird? I’ve got a book, Spin Dictators: The Changing Face of Tyranny in the 21st Century by Sergei Guriev, and Daniel Treisman.

Anne-Marie: Oh, interesting.

Kaiser: Have you read that yet?

Anne-Marie: Spin Dictator. Good. No, I haven’t, but I will add it. Sounds interesting.

Kaiser: Yeah. Spin Dictator. They basically identify this trend whereby, I think it’s probably obvious to most of us, many, by no means all, dictatorships have moved away from really overt coercion, imprisonment, and disappearing, and execution, and the likes, and toward really sophisticated use of propaganda, of censorship, of what Russians call political technology, and lawsuits. It focuses a lot on Lee Kuan Yew as a kind of progenitor to this whole approach. What’s interesting to me is how they’re not quite ready to put China entirely into the old category of fear dictatorship, though they clearly lean that way up. They recognize that it has features of both. And China does actually use the spin approach. It does a lot of sentiment analysis of its own population. It tries to kind of deliver the goods, and it does. It’s not as coercive, certainly as it once was, in terms of the number of people who are actually imprisoned. This, of course, is a number that doesn’t count, probably Xinjiang. But there’s a whole lot of obvious technology that is making both the spin approach and the fear approach much more potent in China. Anyway, very, very-

Anne-Marie: I will definitely look at it. It’s interesting. That’s 1984. When we say that’s Orwellian, we mean something that is the exact opposite. It’s presented as the exact opposite of what it really is. Really, he understood the mind control. There’s a lot in 1984, but most of it, at least what I remember, is that complete control of an information environment.

Kaiser: I should caveat that. I mean, it’s a very interesting book. It seems to be grounded in very solid research. I have not looked at every footnote and followed every one of them. I mean, it certainly sounded very plausible to me, but the whole kind of heuristic of spin dictators versus fear dictators is good. And it helps, I think, to understand a lot of what’s happening in Erdogan’s Turkey, and in Hungary, in Poland, and especially in Russia.

Anne-Marie: Yes. And in the nature of warfare, again, going forward, where the disruption… And if you can’t create a wholesale information environment among your adversary, you can at least create chaos.

Kaiser: Yeah. Which is, I fear, going to happen again soon.

Anne-Marie: Yes.

Kaiser: Anne-Marie Slaughter, thank you so much for taking the time, and what a… I hope to have you back on the show again soon.

Anne-Marie: I enjoyed it thoroughly and learned a lot from your recommendations and the folks who’ve appeared on the podcast before, and sort of it’s like a through line for our conversations. I know many of them. So, this has really been delightful.

Kaiser: Thank you so much. The Sinica Podcast is powered by The China Project and is a proud part of the Sinica Network. Our show is produced and edited by me, Kaiser Kuo. We would be delighted if you would drop us an email at sinica@thechinaproject.com, or just give us a rating and a review on Apple Podcasts as this really does help people discover the show. Meanwhile, follow us on Twitter or on Facebook at @thechinaproj, and be sure to check out all the shows in the Sinica Network. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next week. Take care.