China Beware! America Is World Police

It's something that's been proposed recently from several quarters is that the U.S. should rescind the Most Favored Nation trade status from China. The Most Favored Nations, not everybody knows what that is because it's an old term. So you want to explain it or I can explain it? Why don't you go ahead. The idea is that if you have a treaty with one nation, you have treaties with a lot of nations, and whatever is the best terms of your best treaty, anyone with Most Favored Nations gets the same favorable terms as your best trading partner. Essentially, it allowed a huge amount of free trade, more or less. It's like any great deal that we have with Canada or England or Germany or whatever, China would get the same terms. But that's stupid because what China does is steal American stuff. They subsidize state-owned and even private industries to artificially out-compete. They abuse workers' rights. They emit more carbon than the rest of the developed world combined. And they're also trying to completely undermine our country. So it does make sense to not treat them as a normal trade partner. Yeah. I mean, in terms of the car thing, Volkswagen just announced also that they need to pull out of China because their factory in Xinjiang, guess what, is implicated in slave labor. No, Volkswagen. The single solitary stain on their history. The interesting thing, Volkswagen has been in China since... They were in the early 80s, right? But the interesting thing is that then they announced that they were going to... They announced that they were pulling out of China and they were going to close this factory in Xinjiang. And then they announced that they're going to double down on their... They have a relationship with a Chinese car manufacturer. They have a co... I don't remember what it's called. But essentially, they have a relationship with a Chinese car manufacturer and they're going to double down on that. Can that Chinese partner use slave labor? Probably. Well, then it's... I mean, I think they might be required to use slave labor. Well, you know, a lot of people are actually very comfortable with slave labor as long as they're not the ones who actually have to own the slaves. Well, the... Do you say the thing recently about Italian tomato products having Xinjiang tomatoes in them? Oh, no. Like Uyghur slave labor tomato in Italian? And Uniqlo had to come out with a statement saying that they don't use any Xinjiang cotton so that their cotton is slave labor free. And then now they're probably going to get boycotted in China. Because they're not using Xinjiang cotton. So the CCP is trying to force companies to use Xinjiang cotton. Which would essentially make them choose between the China market or the rest of the world. Yeah, I mean, in the U.S., especially with the Uyghur Forced Labor Act, that is now illegal to import things. There was the parent company of Tommy Hilfiger. Like they got sanctioned, I think, by China for not using Xinjiang cotton. This is why, you know, slavery has historically been in a lot of different cultures. But it's always been very difficult to get rid of for this very reason, right? Which is that the slave owners, in this case, the slave owners of the CCP, they not only have their own interest in maintaining the slave labor, but they also use their power to force people to be a part of that system. And I believe that to have been the case historically in the U.S. and other places. So like, even though almost nobody actually wants slavery, but the slaveholders try to force people to be in that system. So then it makes it very difficult to eradicate. And the only solution is to really, truly eradicate slavery everywhere in every country. And it's just so hard to do. There are more slaves now than there were at any point in history. Yeah. It's thinking about Star Wars War. I'm thinking about, I started reading that book you recommended, The Years of Rice and Salt. Oh, you did? Wow. Yeah. So it does have some stuff about slavery and some other stuff. I recommend that book to you, dear listener. I'm only on chapter four, so I don't, I just started reading it. But it's, that's a great book. I don't know how he assimilated so much knowledge, the author. Oh, yeah. And like, but like, it starts off in this guy, he's like a Mongolian warrior. He's like, he's like walking alone across like all of the stands. Yeah, he was like part of some failed, it's an alternate history book. So he's been part of some failed Mongolian quest. And he goes into Europe. And the premise of the book is the Black Death. Instead of wiping out a third of Europe, wiped out 99 percent of it. Right. And so then he's just walking through like these completely decimated European town. Right. Have you got to the part where he gets to essentially Greece and he just finds like the vat of olive oil? And he just drinks the olive oil for four days? Yeah, he's just there just eating just a jug. Because he's starving because there's like nothing. Yeah. I'm just imagining drinking olive oil for four days. That's just like it's a source of calories. Yeah. Fantastic book. Really recommend it. Wait, actually, I feel like it was only a few podcasts ago that you insisted that you did not read books. What what what is real? What is is fake? That's the theme of Dreams of Black Mansions. Red Chambers. Wow. What? Well, how are you going to explain this? Did you read Dream of the Red Chamber? Yeah, I did. That's a that's a weird and very pornographic book. And it was partly pornographic not compared to the one we can't ever remember the name of the plum and jade vase flower. That one like actually. Oh, yeah. So speaking of you mentioned that the David Hasselhoff Museum was the sexiest one that you that you know of. Oh, no, Matt, let's not. You're right. No, never mind. I won't say it. I shouldn't say it. Let's let's move on. Yeah, I feel like I just got like like a truck just passed inches in front of me. And I just I just you know something. You definitely dodged something. Yeah. So anyways, bullet dodged. You were talking about a truck dodged. Yeah, because you probably wouldn't see the bullet. You were talking about most favored nation. I think we got to Matt explaining what that was. And then we went on to this whole thing about anyway, company. So China has had permanent most favored nation trade status. The great thing about making it permanent is it really encourages the other other partner to really, you know, keep on the straight and narrow. Well, the thing was that since the Tiananmen Square massacre, what had happened is that every year that the trade status of China was reviewed in Congress. And they would the human rights record would come up all the stuff. And it's not like they ever rescinded it. Yeah, but but they had to approve it. They had to approve it right here. And so after in 1999, they passed it and were like, OK, we don't need to ever approve this again. Those hardworking members of Congress had to decide to work a little a little less. Yeah, well, I I read some of the arguments in the congressional record about it. And, you know, Senator Joe Biden was like, you know, it's this this is an important thing for us to do for the people of China. And it wasn't like he was alone, right? Yeah. Bill Clinton was pushing for this. This was seen as the great new thing that we were going to do. And then so we passed permanent most favored nation trading status. And then the next year we helped China get into the deal. But at least those things turn China into a liberal democracy. Yeah, yeah. Definitely worked in so many ways. But so now the there's a bill that's been introduced in Congress by members of the select committee on the CCP to rescind most permanent most favored nation trade status. And other people are talking about it. Guest of the podcast, Grant Newsham, has written a op ed in, I think, on Fox News that talks about how what we should do with Ukraine, actually. And he was the comparison he made was like, look at what happened with South Vietnam and we shouldn't make the same mistake with Ukraine. I believe one of the things that you had wanted to do when we were talking about history unearthed as a show that we wanted to do, you wanted to do an episode about how the U.S. won the Vietnam War. I was about to get into that because that's important context for South Vietnam. Yeah. Where the U.S. The war was over. It was essentially like Korea, where it was divided between North and South. War was done. Then American hero Nixon got purged by the filthy forces against him. This is another one of those things where there are no heroes in the story. Yeah, but basically anti-war Democrats took over Congress and just over the course of years pulled all funding for South Vietnam. Then like North Vietnam was like, hey, we can start the war. Maybe we can take this. And they they slowly encroached. No pushback from the U.S. The president of South Vietnam was begging on TV for the U.S. to do something. I think it was Gerald Ford. Gerald Ford was begging Congress to do something. And they're like, no, no, we're not going to give any support for South Vietnam. And so the war was lost after the fact. South Vietnam fell. It did not have to fall. It was pure incompetence by the U.S. So Grant's argument is that we should not make that same mistake in Ukraine, where, you know, obviously an endless war in Ukraine is not what anybody wants, but also that he was talking about the destabilizing secondary effects of South Vietnam falling to what happened in Cambodia. After that, with the Khmer Rouge, like all the stuff that was destabilizing things that were happening in Asia after that. So his point was that whatever happens with Ukraine and Russia, Russia can't come out the winner. Like, yeah. So that includes that we would have to do things like, you know, deal with Russia, Iran, North Korea and China and make sure that they're not able to, like, support each other into like this new Axis power. And his main point was like, you really don't have to do all that much. Like with the example of true Korea, he he he said, like, like we could do new sanctions or we could just enforce the ones that are already there. Yeah, we there's a lot of loopholes. Yeah. Or Russia sanctions the same. Like there are a lot of loopholes with the China thing was when he was saying that revoking most favored nation trade status is like something we should do. Yeah. Because China is supporting Russia in the war. Yeah. Money and material goods. And it's fairly obvious at this point. And North Korean troops are there. Yeah. So also Iran destabilizing the Middle East. We need to stop funding them. That would be a good idea. Yeah. But again, sanctions and for sure that if you don't, if you give Iran billions of dollars, maybe what they'll do is they'll put them into, you know, like social welfare programs for the people. They won't use it to fund the nuclear program. Or so, you know, proxy Hamas or even like what Obama did with Project Cassandra, where there was this whole like the FBI was going to blow up. Has I think it was Hezbollah's drug trafficking. Obama was like, stop doing that because I want to make an Iran deal. And as well as Iran proxy. Yeah. Like what a stupid thing to do. Yeah. I mean, I think. And when people it makes me mad when people like the Obama was the only controversy in his presidency at that time, he wore a tan suit. It's like, no. I mean, I really liked Obama. It's just like at the time, because he's so well-spoken and like so. Well, I mean, he had the Riz, as they say. But but yeah, when you look back on it, on some of his stuff, you can see that a lot of those decisions that were made. There were a lot of foreign policy failures that were made at essentially at taking authoritarian regimes at their word. Yeah. Yeah. And he was just too trusting. Yeah. Well, I mean, it's like with the fentanyl thing. Obama, Trump, Biden both listened to Xi Jinping. It was like, yeah, well. We'll stop fentanyl. Not like we're subsidizing and enforcing it on you as part of a drug warfare to destroy you. But yeah. So, Grant, we should put a link to his op-ed. Oh, yeah, we can do that. But because he had some interesting ideas for how to deal with Iran, how to deal with Russia, his how to deal with Russia was similar to what he was saying about China, which is like sanction Putin's wealth. And if you cannot get at all of it, then you expose the the wealth of the corrupt Russian oligarchy. Yeah. The way that he's talked about doing with the CCP. Yeah. Which, you know, it's authoritarian leaders do not want truth. They do not want a light shined on their behavior. Yeah. So. Well, that's the solution. And the thing that this requires, though, is for. I'll just use America, the American government, the American societies to understand that a war is going on and we actually have to fight it. It's not just one war, right? There's a lot going on. But I'm talking about like this whole collective thing between Russia, North Korea, Iran, China. The way that they are, they are currently at war with us. All of these forces want to destroy the United States. We have to recognize that and actually realize that this is a war and we have to fight back. Yeah. The fighting back part. But there are so many ways to fight back that don't involve military. Yeah. Yeah. There are plenty of options. I mean, I think this was this was one of the successes of the successes of the first Trump administration with how he helped destroy ISIS by cutting off. The money. I think what's interesting also is there is essentially a foreign policy. I don't know if you want to call it a theory or belief system among certain foreign policy elite, mostly on the democratic side, where essentially it's a bad for the US to use. The US is the superpower in the world, but it is bad for the US to use its power because, you know, we're the oppressor and everybody else is the oppressor, et cetera, et cetera. Yeah. So then this is the point that drew have made in a politically incorrect way. I use a delight on Twitter where he was like, OK, well, the the Sullivan Lincoln like wimpy, he used another word that I'm not going to use because I don't want you to do. But on our website, would you use it? Maybe. But he was just talking about how this terrible foreign policy is is what's causing a lot of it. He was actually talking about in terms of South Korea, where he was like the US is South Korea's biggest. Our like they could they could play a role in like the military. Yeah. And things like that. But the US is afraid to do anything, essentially. Oh, yeah. The context was that Lincoln was like, oh, we're expressing great concern. Right. And he was like, the US could do a lot more than just express concern. Were they always expressing concern about Iran, about Russia and China and whatever? But yeah, I think there's this caution that is more likely to get us into war than the yeah, the US should not use its power. I saw somebody make a point, but like complaining online today about how like, oh, you know, the way Trump is like talking to like Canada and Mexico and all these other powers, it's like he's acting like he's the boss of the world. And it's like, well, you know, the American president, that's that's kind of what people want. And yeah, I think that this is the antithesis of that. Right. The the way that the current foreign policy elite is like, oh, well, we want China to join the international order, like the the international liberal world order and, you know, be part of the solution. Like they have no interest in being part of the solution. That is not what they want to do. And they want to be the world police. Yeah. So it's just anyway, it's it is very frustrating. And interestingly, one of the comments that Drew's. Post was that someone was like, I'm a Democrat, but I am very excited to see Marco Rubio as the next secretary of state because I hate the way that the Democrats do foreign policy. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, the obvious, obvious solution and this this always works well is you just got to say that, like, you know, the communists are inside the country to declare martial law and then everything solves itself, right? Yeah. Yeah. No problems whatsoever. Yeah. Well, you heard it here first on China Inscripted. I am declaring martial law. I am in charge now. You apparently had about as much of an ability to declare martial law as the person. Yeah. Yeah. Except I won't rescind this. Rescind. There you go. Yeah. I've learned something today.