Name: Gen. H.R. McMaster on the USA's Economic Competition with China
Uploaded: 2022-01-13T18:06:54.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gen. H.R. McMaster on the USA's Economic Competition with China' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-13. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Gen. H.R. McMaster on the USA's Economic Competition with China' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2022-01-13. Transcript available.

The Joe Rogan Experience.
And so I think the supply chain issue is a big part of this and the assessment
of vulnerabilities.
And, you know, we're in a race because it takes like five, six years to develop
a fab, you know, to generate semiconductors.
There are big investments happening now in Phoenix.
You know, for example, Phoenix is going to be the site of a TSMC, a big fab.
TSMC is the chip manufacturer that's based in Taiwan, which is, you know, a
single point of failure almost, you know, for big parts of our supply chain
internationally.
And, of course, the reason that's significant is it's in a place that's under
threat by the Chinese Communist Party as well.
Yeah, I think they're making a Samsung plant, a chip plant here in Texas as
well.
They are.
They are.
Yeah, right.
And in Austin.
It's outside of Austin.
It's just terrifying to think that we have to catch up in six years.
Because six years in the world of tech is – that's 100 years.
It's an eon.
It is.
Well, there's a lot you can do even before that, and I think it's starting to
happen in terms of the shifting of supply chains elsewhere.
You just saw Intel is going to invest a lot in Malaysia.
And you might think, well, why in Malaysia?
Well, I think the key is it doesn't all have to be in the United States.
It has to be in a number of places.
So it's resilient, right?
What if there's a natural disaster, a power outage, right?
You want multiple sources.
And, of course, as you mentioned, the reason this became apparent to all of us
was at the beginning of COVID, right, when you couldn't get PPE and
pharmaceuticals and so forth.
So I think we're just waking up to this competition.
And this ought to be one of those areas where we all come together, right?
This should not be a partisan issue at all.
And it should be a multinational issue, right?
The reason the subtitle of the book is The Fight to Defend the Free World is we
need others to come with us, right?
Yeah.
We need the European Union and the U.K. and Japan and Australia.
I think that's starting to happen as well, right?
Because, you know, look at what Xi Jinping has done just since the pandemic,
right?
Foisted the pandemic on the world.
You know, crushed anybody who was trying to ring the alarm bells about it.
These are reporters and doctors, right?
Then added insult to injury with this wolf warrior diplomacy, which I know you've
talked about on the show here as well.
And then a range of aggressive actions like, you know, bludgeoning Indian
soldiers to death on the Himalayan frontier, right?
Scores of overflights into Taiwanese air defense identification zone.
Weaponizing islands in the South China Sea.
And if they succeed, there will be the largest land grab, so to speak, in
history.
And that's, you know, by the way, an area across which one third of the world's
surface trade flows.
Right.
You know, the intimidation towards Japan, a massive campaign of economic coercion
against Australia and now Lithuania.
And so what I would often hear, you know, from friends, you know, in Southeast
Asia and beyond, you know, these are my counterparts who I was engaging when I
was National Security Advisor.
They would say, hey, don't force us to choose, right?
Don't force us to choose between Washington and Beijing.
And what I would tell them is, hey, that's not the choice you face, right?
The choice you face is between sovereignty and servitude, right?
And, you know, the United States is on the side of sovereignty.
China wants servitude.
Because what Xi Jinping wants to do, and the party is clear about this, is they
want to establish exclusionary areas of primacy across the Indo-Pacific region
and excluding who?
Us, right?
As the first step in really being able to rewrite some of the rules of
international commerce and political discourse and then to isolate their
regional rival, Japan, right?
And so I think we're at a critical moment where we have to compete effectively.
And this does not mean that we have to – we're on a path to confrontation.
Actually, I think, Joe, because we had vacated these competitive spaces, China
became more and more emboldened, and we were actually on a path to
confrontation.
When now I think this idea of transparent competition is what we ought to
really pursue with China.
So do you think that that makes us less likely to be in competition with China
in terms – or less likely to be in conflict with China if we can change our
whole economic profile here in terms of tech, in terms of manufacturing?
I do.
I do.
Because I think, really, we have to recognize what China is trying to do, right?
So people talk about decoupling all the time, and you alluded to this a little
bit like, hey, businesses have to make a decision, right?
I mean, they've got responsibilities to their shareholders and so forth.
So the whole idea of a complete decoupling, that's always been kind of like a
red herring, right?
That's not what we're talking about.
I mean, what we ought to do is ask businesses, take a Hippocratic oath, right?
Don't do any hurt or harm in three areas.
First of all, don't help the Chinese Communist Party gain an unfair
differential advantage over us militarily or in the emerging data-driven, you
know, global economy.
Second, right, I mean, don't help the party.
You know, don't help the party perfect its technologically enabled Orwellian
police state, right?
Don't help them do that.
Don't invest in Chinese AI companies, right, that are extinguishing human
freedom and weaponizing people's social networks against them and everything.
And then the third is don't compromise the long-term viability of your company
in exchange for short-term profits, right?
And so many companies have been through this, right?
I mean, and so I think that's a way to think about it and to think about it in
light of what the Chinese Communist Party leadership wants, right?
So what Xi Jinping talks about is a dual circulation economy, right, where they
get a grip on critical supply chains internationally.
I mean, if you want to look at human rights abuses, look at what they're doing
in the DRC and the Congo, right, in terms of extracting at a horrible
humanitarian price the rare earths that they need to continue their
manufacturing of microelectronics, for example.
But what he wants to do is get a grip on those supply chains and then create
enough domestic demand that he doesn't need anybody else, right?
That he can write the terms to everybody else, that he has everybody else, you
know, in a position of where he can use coercive power.
And what I describe in Battlegrounds is the strategy, I think the easy way to
think about it is co-option, coercion, and concealment, right?
Co-opt you, co-opt businesses, co-opt elites, right, with the lure of short-term
profits and access to the Chinese market, right, Chinese investment.
And then once you're in, right, to use that influence for coercive purposes,
right?
Look at what they're doing to Lithuania.
Look at what they're doing to Australia, right?
Look at what they did to Marriott, MBA, you know, U.S. and international
companies.
And then to conceal all of this.
All of this is just normal business practices.
Well, it's not normal business practices, right?
If you look at One Belt, One Road, right, which is there, they have three main
strategies, right?
Military-Civil Fusion, and I describe all these in the book.
Military-Civil Fusion, then, you know, associated with that is Made in China
2025, which is part of this dual circulation economy,
becoming completely, you know, no longer dependent at all on any external
sources of advanced technologies, for example,
or aspects of supply chains.
And then finally, One Belt, One Road, which is an effort to create servile
relationships with companies by overly indebting them, right?
And so the new vanguard of the Chinese Communist Party, you know, is a Chinese
Communist Party official accompanied by a Chinese national bank guy with a duffel
bag full of cash, right?
And they get the most traction in corrupt governments, you know, and then once
they indebt them for generations, right,
then they can trade debt for equity or they can use it for coercive purposes.
If you say one crossword about the party, we're going to call back all your
debt and you're going to go broke, right?
So I think we just have to recognize co-option, coercion, concealment, defend
against it.
But then, of course, you know, as we look to the future, how do we maintain and
expand our competitive advantages?