WTH happened at the Biden-Putin summit? Leon Aron on why the US-Russia meeting was a win for Putin

Episode #107 | June 17, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, , and Leon Aron

Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.

Marc Thiessen: And I'm Marc Thiessen.

Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell Is Going On? What the hell is going on this week, Marc?

Marc Thiessen: Well, we're a day late in delivering our podcast this week, because we wanted to wait with bated breath for the dueling press conferences of Vladimir Putin and President after the historic summit in Geneva. What do you think, Dany, how did Biden do on his first foray into US-Russian diplomacy?

Danielle Pletka: Well, this is meant to be Joe Biden's sweet-spot, right? All of our audience has heard Marc and me talk about our experiences with Senator Biden, Chairman Biden of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. This is the reason that he was chosen to be Barack Obama's vice president, was because he was sort of an éminence grise in an area that Barack Obama knew very little about, foreign policy. And I got to say it struck me, first and foremost, as weak and naive. And for a guy who's pretty fancy with his tough guy rhetoric, Joe Biden loves to talk tough, right? Loves to say those tough things. Yeah. It was a little wimpy.

Marc Thiessen: Here's my assessment of it. We've had many discussions on this podcast about 's Russia policies. And we were all appalled by the Helsinki Summit where he stood next to Putin and said things that we don't need to repeat here, but it was an embarrassment for our country. But Donald Trump for all of his rhetorical weakness on Russia, was actually incredibly tough when it came to actual policy.

Marc Thiessen: He sold Javelin missiles to Ukraine when the Obama-Biden administration only would give them meals ready to eat. He talked about it on our podcast and I interviewed him in the Oval Office, President Trump launched a cyber-attack on the Internet Research Agency, the troll firm that was interfering in our elections. He gave US forces a green light to kill hundreds of Russians mercenaries in a firefight in Syria, which wasn't an easy decision to make. He got NATO members to increase their contributions by $140 billion.

Marc Thiessen: And he expelled Russian diplomats. He withdrew from the INF Treaty. He did a

2 lot of things, and also he managed to stop construction of the Nord Stream 2 Pipeline. And guess when it picked up? When Joe Biden came into office, they started construction again, and he lifted the sanctions, which is a huge gift to Vladimir Putin. So I like the tough talk. I wish President Trump's talk matched his actions, but I would prefer to speak softly and carry a big stick than speak loudly and carry a twig.

Danielle Pletka: I think that one can reasonably debate how well Donald Trump did on this issue, but I don't think there's any doubt in the minds of the Russian leadership that they are going to have to use Joe Biden's word, a much more predictable president in the White House right now. And that's good for them. Our colleague, Hal Brands had a very good piece about how predictability only serves Russian interests, because it basically puts the ball in their court to destabilize the world. One thing Vladimir Putin doesn't want is to be the midget at the table as Xi Jinping and Joe Biden discuss the fate of the world, right? He doesn't want to be an afterthought. And what the White House is basically signaling to him is, "No, no, no. You can be the spoiler. You can sit at the table with the big boys and you can misbehave and it will cause us to pay more attention to you."

Danielle Pletka: So I think there was a lot of immaturity, and I think there was a lot of naivety in this summit. You and I both have discussed endlessly how happy our friends in the G7 are, how happy our European allies are, that they can finally go back to eating brie and drinking Chardonnay in the way that they used to before that pig Donald Trump entered the White House. And it's clear, we've gone back to that. The problem is that that sort of signaling has consequences.

Marc Thiessen: The first part of the trip, the summit with the G7 and the NATO allies, I mean, that was a layup. All you had to be was not be Donald Trump, and our allies love not being pushed about meeting their 2% GDP commitments on defense, commitments to the NATO Alliance. They love not being pushed on trade disputes. And I think they even suspended one of the trade disputes that Trump had started with them. And Germany loves not being pushed to give up the Nord Stream pipeline. But again, these are gifts to, the last one especially, is a gift to Putin. We had Dan Yergin on the podcast last year and he wrote a fantastic book about the shale revolution and its implications. And under Trump, America emerged as an energy superpower. We became one of the largest exporters of oil and the single largest exporter of natural gas. And one of the implications of that, and Yergin pointed out on our podcast, that one of the major critics of the US shale revolution was somebody in Moscow named Vladimir Putin.

Marc Thiessen: And, so when Russia cuts off gas through Ukraine in 2006, the Europeans weren't in a good position to deal with that. But now because the United States provides an alternative through its production of natural gas and export of natural gas, they have an alternative to Russian natural gas, right? So what's happened under Biden? We are cracking down on and trying to basically unilaterally disarm as an energy superpower and get rid of fossil fuels, which give us this edge. And at the same time, he's allowing Vladimir Putin to build this pipeline through the Baltic Sea. And why is that important? Because if you have a pipeline through the Baltic Sea, before all Russian natural gas sales to Western Europe had to go through Eastern Europe, but if you can go directly to Western Europe, then he can squeeze Eastern Europe and cut off their natural gas without causing a rift

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3 with Western Europe or affecting their natural gas sales. So the combination of getting rid of the Keystone XL pipeline and facilitating the Nord Stream 2 pipeline is a double gift to Vladimir Putin.

Danielle Pletka: It's interesting to me that more people don't see it that way. And I understand that there's an obsession with, and in some cases justified, in some cases unjustified with the fossil fuel impact on climate change, but-

Marc Thiessen: We did a podcast on that too.

Danielle Pletka: We did. In fact, for all of you who are looking for some background on Nord Stream 2, or on the shale revolution, I commend to you both our interview with Jonathan Swan, who did a great job backgrounding everybody on what's happening with Nord Stream, and also the Ukrainian perspective. He had just interviewed Ukrainian president, Zelensky when we did that. And Dan Yergin's podcast with us. We'll link those both in the transcript if you're interested. Just a couple more words, and I don't want to step on our interview, which is super interesting, but a couple more words about the outcome of this summit.

Danielle Pletka: So, yes, they talked about climate change. Yes, they talked a little bit about arms control, because you can't have a meeting with the Russians without talking about arms control. But the other two big things they talked about were Russian cyber-attacks on the United States, and all of you who couldn't get gas for about a week on the East Coast should know that that was the result of a Russian cyber- attack on Colonial Pipeline that the Russian government denied any knowledge of. And a subsequent Russian cyber-attack as well on an infrastructure target. President Biden brought that up with President Putin and made clear that 16 areas of our critical infrastructure were off limits for Russian cyber-attacks. I just -- a little bit like that whole, We're going to withdraw from Afghanistan by 9/11 kind of a thing -- I just asked myself if these folks at the White House and State Department ought to more often stand in front of the mirror and kind of practice their presentation and just see? No, these 16 areas are off limits. Okay. So what's not off limits then?

Marc Thiessen: So the message from the Americans ought to be, America's off limits, right? Not 16 parts of America, because God bless number 17 and on, right? They're on their own apparently when it comes to Russian hacking. I don't know what number 17 is, but I feel really sorry for them and I certainly hope that I'm not invested in them, because that's pretty bad. But also it's not just this summit, but they made a big deal earlier in the week of signing an agreement with Russia on cyber hacking, which is kind of like signing an agreement with China on lab leaks. It's like, they're the ones doing the cyber hacking.

Danielle Pletka: We need Jon Stewart's expertise on this matter, Marc.

Marc Thiessen: Exactly. I was listening to Jack Keane this morning talking about this and Jack knows better than anybody, the awesome offensive cyber capability that we have developed over the last decade. And the message to Putin should be, not just if you touch these 16 places, if you launch another cyber-attack from Russian soil on America, we are going to take out the entity that did it, and we're going to impose costs on you. And we're going to use that offensive cyber capability.

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4 Danielle Pletka: I don't know if that was the message he received.

Marc Thiessen: ... it was not recorded, but I don't know, it doesn't sound like that was the message he received based on his post-summit press conference.

Danielle Pletka: So the other weird bit was the even sharper message. So there was cyber, okay, 16 off limits. But then there was this message about Alexei Navalny. Now you guys know we've talked a lot about Alexei Navalny, especially with Vladimir Kara- Murza, who was our guest on the podcast and is his close friend.

Marc Thiessen: Basically Dany is saying, go back and listen to all of our previous podcasts-

Danielle Pletka: Yes exactly.

Marc Thiessen: We've covered this area, we've covered this-

Danielle Pletka: All we can do is talk about the same thing again and again. So, Alexei Navalny was, first, Putin attempted to murder him using nerve warfare. Then he imprisoned him. Then he watched him become deathly ill in prison. And only after substantial threats, finally allowed him hospital care. But Biden chooses the word to describe the US reaction if Alexei Navalny dies. He says to Putin, "The American reaction will be devastating. I'm sorry, dude. That's not credible.

Marc Thiessen: Well, especially since I believe those are ... I'd have to go back and look, but those are, if not the exact same words, then very similar words to the words that Barack Obama said when he warned him not to invade Ukraine. I mean, and take it and seize Crimea, right?

Danielle Pletka: You do not want to issue empty threats.

Marc Thiessen: And you would think the Obama-Biden world, and by the way, as you've pointed out many times in this podcast, the Biden administration is basically, in foreign policy, the Obama administration continued. Because it's all the same people in these top positions. You would think that they would have learned about the danger of drawing red lines that you don't plan to enforce. So I don't know. I mean, look, I am glad that he raised Navalny. I am glad that he made clear that it's a priority for the United States. It would have been a disaster if he hadn't raised it. I just hope he's got a plan for what he's going to do if and when Navalny dies in Putin's prison.

Danielle Pletka: I hope he does, too. So this and more we are taking up with your colleague and mine, Marc, Dr. Leon Aron, who is the director of Russian studies at the American Enterprise Institute. Everybody knows who Leon is. He's written extensively on these issues in , , and in pretty much every other outlet. He is working right now on a book on Vladimir Putin, which I'm very excited about, and all of us remember his fantastic biography of Yeltsin, which really was a seminal piece of work. So here he is.

Marc Thiessen: Well, Leon, welcome back to the podcast.

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5 Leon Aron: I'm glad to be here, Marc.

Marc Thiessen: We're glad to have you on this auspicious week, so we just had the completion of the first Biden-Putin summit. In the history of US-Russian summits, going back to Reagan in Reykjavik and the Nixon summits and all the rest, where does this one rank?

Leon Aron: Putin is a wartime president. If you look at what he says to his people, how he structures the legitimacy of his regime around war with the outside world, very few things could be expected of the summit and every other summit with Putin. And I think, replying to Marc's question, how that rates, it rates below those two instances, the Nixon-Brezhnev detente and the Gorbachev-Reagan meetings, because the regime that Putin forged is not given to compromise with the United States. He needs the enemy.

Danielle Pletka: So Leon, thank you, first of all, for joining us. I know you're really in demand. You had a really good little, what journalists call a walk-up, blog post to the summit. A cheat sheet, you called it. And you describe the summit as a big domestic political boost for the Kremlin. You then went on in your bottom line said, and I'm just going to quote, because it was very articulate, "This represents a big, legitimizing, cost-free political win for Putin." Okay. That was your assessment beforehand. Before we even talk about the substance of what President Biden and Putin talked about, why are you saying that?

Leon Aron: Because just like it was in the Soviet Union, a meeting with the American president is in and of itself is a huge domestic boost for then the Soviet, now the Russian leader. The country is obsessed with America and there are fascinating reasons why. But suffice to say that it defines itself, just like as the Soviet Union did, it defines itself on the world stage, its significance, its weight, by its opposition to the United States and by the respect that the United States pays it. And every time there is a summit, regardless of the substance, regardless of how successful or unsuccessful it becomes or turns out to be, it is a big win for a Russian leader, as it was for Soviet ones.

Marc Thiessen: So, Putin got that summit and that legitimizing summit. He got an extension of the START Treaty. He got Nord Stream 2. What did we get?

Leon Aron: Exactly. Exactly. I would add to this, Marc, the timing was singularly inefficient. In general, yes, you need to meet with all sorts of leaders, and that's the nature of diplomacy. But look at the sequence. An American president calls the Russian president a killer. The Russian president amasses a hundred thousand troops on the border of a neighboring European country and threatens a war. The American president calls for a summit. You don't have to be Ivan Pavlov to see how this conditions reflexes on Putin's part. Every time you threaten a war, every time you talk tough, every time you amass troops, America comes to you and asks to talk. As our past president used to say, going forward, I don't think this is a good precedent.

Danielle Pletka: So another thing that it shocked me that the United States sort of a priori seemed not simply willing, but almost enthusiastic to give away, along with our NATO allies ... And remember, President Biden had a G7 meeting first, and he had a

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6 NATO meeting first, then he met with President Putin in Switzerland. And the thing that he was also game to give away was the idea of Ukraine joining NATO. This is something Russia is absolutely opposed to. It is a huge priority for Ukrainian President Zelensky, who we theoretically are supporting against the Russians, and yet we've been completely unwilling to even extend the possibility of a process towards NATO membership. What do you think?

Leon Aron: Well, it goes with Marc's question as well. We prepaid the ante. We fed the kitty rather robustly here. Right. No conversation even about Ukrainian membership or a MAP, sort of the preliminary technicalities of admitting a country into NATO in some distant future. They didn't get that. We rescinded the sanctions on Nord Stream 2. And, as you mentioned, there was apparently ... in the conversations with Putin, apparently there was some talk of Ukraine. But the real issue is how seriously he takes it.

Leon Aron: Remember, Dany, I know you're a student and a lover of diplomatic history. Sixty years ago at the very same place, almost at the same time, there was this disastrous meeting between a newly elected American president and one Nikita Khrushchev, and that president failed to impress Khrushchev. And two months later, the Berlin Wall went up, and a year and a half later, we had Soviet nuclear weapons in Cuba. Again, I hope the ghosts were not terribly aggressive or angry and the echoes did not permeate the summit, but I just very much hope that Putin truly believes that Biden is strong and determined and all the presumably warnings that Biden articulated will be taken seriously by Putin.

Danielle Pletka: So, I mean, I'm not the only student of history here. Remember, so Putin can look back to that meeting between Khrushchev and Kennedy. But he can also look back to Yalta, in which the major powers got together and agreed to hand the fate of Eastern Europe off to the Soviet Union. I don't want to overdraw these analogies, but here are the NATO members all getting together and kind of saying, "Eh, Ukraine, Georgia, whatever."

Leon Aron: Dany's thing about Yalta, that's Putin's dream. He can't wait. I mean, there was an epithet going with the dream, but I'm not going to mention it. This is a public show.

Marc Thiessen: We've got an explicit rating.

Danielle Pletka: No. We're not going there. Thank you, Leon.

Leon Aron: Yeah. A dream. And of course, as my Russian colleagues say, he's constantly trying on Stalin's boots and Stalin's military coat. Yes, he wants to be there with the big boys and girls. And he actually mentioned this. So yes, he would love to have this sort of thing. I don't think he's got it at this summit, but neither was he really slapped on the knuckles. And I think he continues to believe that this is a viable dream.

Marc Thiessen: This summit also came on the heels of Putin's proxy, Alexander Lukashenko basically hijacking an aircraft in international airspace and forcing it to land in order to seize a diplomat. I can't imagine, maybe you disagree, that that was done without Putin's foreknowledge and approval. And I know that the press

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7 reports indicated that there were at least two Russians on that plane who got off in Minsk and never got back on. Do you think that that was an operation coordinated with Putin? And what does it say to give him a summit after that incident took place?

Leon Aron: Oh, almost certainly, Marc. By the way, I think you just misspoke. It was a dissident. But it doesn't matter. The point is in the Russian security intelligence gossip that I gather, it is almost now an article of faith that this could not have been done, A, without technical capabilities of the FSB or SVR, which is Foreign Intelligence Service of Russia. But also, even assuming that Belarus had those capabilities, which is very unlikely without an explicit, "Okay," from the Kremlin. So yes, this is almost certain, and yes, you're right. This could be counted by Putin as yet another greasing of the skids before the summit.

Danielle Pletka: So let's talk a little bit about the aftermath. And this is one of the reasons why we're actually producing our podcast a day late is because we really wanted the opportunity to talk to you after Biden and Putin had come out and given their respective press conferences. We were force fed this notion that Biden had, in a very manly fashion, refused to do a joint press conference with Putin, like Donald Trump. And so this was meant to be a scene setter for us. This was going to be a tough, tough meeting. But what seems to have come out of it is a very not credible threat on Alexei Navalny, some very troubling discourse on the question of critical infrastructure and cyber-attacks, and some generic conversation about arms control. What do you see as the product of this, substantively, as the product of this summit?

Leon Aron: Dany, the deliverables were obvious from the very beginning. Two things, we are back to, what, 35 years pre Gorbachev where the basis of our relationship with Russia is arms control. That's it. And everything else is not even an icing on the cake, because there's no cake. But there's just empty talk. My favorite, Dany, is the climate control or climate change. I would love to see Putin's face when Joe Biden describes the New Green Deal at the time when Russia is collecting billions of dollars to go far north and to become the biggest producer of liquidified gas, and just invested $75 billion in expanding its coal-export capacity.

Leon Aron: So the first thing is we will be talking about arms control, strategic weapons, where by the way, we did give them a pass on hypersonic missiles. Putin has embarked on enormously expensive breakneck modernization of the Russian nuclear arsenal. They just built Sarmat, which is the largest ever made strategic nuclear weapon, nuclear missile. They have actually tested hypersonic missiles, which is a new generation of missiles. And obviously hypersonic means that they move with multiples of the speed of sound, very, very dangerous. And as far as I could see, we're way behind them on that. All sorts of wonder weapons that Putin described, actually, in his address to the nation in 2018.

Leon Aron: So apparently this is something that those multi-lateral talks will touch on, but I can assure you that Putin is not going to give up any of this. So I'm not sure how productive those conversations will be. The return of ambassadors, of the two ambassadors, the Russian ambassador goes back to Washington. The US ambassador goes back to Moscow. And beyond that, I really don't see anything

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8 tangible.

Marc Thiessen: Well worse than that, I mean, if you look at what the Biden administration said they wanted out of the summit is that they wanted the strategic stability and predictability, right? That's what America wants out of this. And presumably they say that Russia would want the same. And so that's what we're trying to achieve here, is just back to normalcy in our relationship, right? But our colleague Hal Brands had a really interesting piece in Bloomberg where he basically said that Putin needs confrontation with the west for domestic reasons, that he will always put domestic stability ahead of international stability. And he pursues the former by undermining the latter. So when we make our hallmark of our success of the summit, strategic stability, normalcy, aren't we really giving the leverage to Putin because he can either deliver or withhold that stability by diktat?

Leon Aron: Well, obviously. Obviously, I think we started our conversation by mentioning how the confrontation with the United States and the US as the enemy that's perennially besieging and attacking Russia, which Putin valiantly defends, is the cornerstone of his regime's legitimacy.

Leon Aron: Now that for 10 years, the Russian economy has zero growth and the zero growth in incomes, so that's absolutely correct. Again, unlike Brezhnev or Gorbachev, although for different reasons, don't expect any detente from this regime. The regime is based on confrontation with the United States. In terms of what will happen and how the perceptions are different or how the articulation of the results is different on both sides, I can assure you, there are all kinds of victory marches on the Russian TV, because this is a victory. In essence, this is an apology by the American president for calling Putin a killer. And we are now respected and talked to, and we are sort of ... We're not back, of course. It's not G8 anymore. I don't think even Putin could count on that, but we're back. America treats us as an equal. This is a huge boost for Putin.

Danielle Pletka: So one bit of good news is that one of Donald Trump's ideas was to revitalize the G8, which was the G7 with Russia. So while I was not too impressed to see Biden on the stage, I was at least happy not to see anybody revive that idea. But there were two other substantive matters that came out of this summit. And well, I was struck by both of them, without leading the witness here.

Danielle Pletka: One was that Biden says that he told Putin that certain areas of what he called critical infrastructure in the United States had to be off limits for cyber-attacks and that he outlined 16 entities that he described as critical infrastructure. I gotta say my first impression was, and I think Marc said this to me before the podcast is, "Damn, I'd hate to be number 17. What does that mean?" But what do you think Putin reads into that sort of a laundry list of, "Hey, here's what you're not allowed to cyber-attack?"

Leon Aron: Well, Dany, again, it goes back to the core issue and it goes back to Khrushchev's perception of Kennedy. Does Putin believe that Biden is capable of carrying out presumably some sort of sanctions or threats of response to Russia's attacks on those 16, 17, 18, 19, 20 objects? In fact, what got me a little upset is that, I mean, instead of saying, "Don't touch any of our systems, just don't do cyber-attacks."

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9 Danielle Pletka: Don't you dare.

Leon Aron: Don't you dare. It's a little strange. I'm told, and you guys probably know better, I'm told that those mysterious buildings around McLean, we have the world's largest capacity, cyber capacity, cyber war capability, maybe something needs to be done to make that point really relevant to Putin.

Marc Thiessen: Well there's a president who did do that. Donald Trump launched a cyber-attack on the Internet Research Agency. So we know it can be done if there's will in the Oval Office. But look, I want to ... exit question for me is I want to ask you about Biden apparently told Putin that if Alexei Navalny dies in prison, that quote, It would be devastating for Russia. That strikes me as a fairly empty threat, but what do you make of it?

Leon Aron: Well, you know, Marc, some of my friends from my Soviet days and Vladimir Kara-Murza now is a very close friend. To be honest, I think even this threat is better than nothing.

Marc Thiessen: Sure.

Leon Aron: But Putin knows very well that there is really nothing that we can do. I don't know the real issue here. Maybe the import of your question is, do you make threats that you cannot carry out or you just then in that case, leave the issue completely untouched? Vladimir Kara-Murza had an interesting article, I believe in The Post the other day where he said, "Well, there were cases, Brezhnev, Nixon, Carter, Brezhnev, Reagan, I think even before Gorbachev, where in some instances it really helped or at least saved the lives. So I think I'm just agnostic on that.

Danielle Pletka: Well, let's hope that more optimistic read is the right one. Leon, thank you so much for taking a little time out of your day for us. We really value your insight. So thanks again.

Marc Thiessen: So I think the way we start this section is by saying, "Someone asked the other first, so what happens next?" There you go Dany, what happens next?

Danielle Pletka: Marc got the question in first. Thank you so much, Marc. I have many deep thoughts on this matter, as always. So I think if I'm Vladimir Putin, I think what happens next is a test.

Marc Thiessen: Yeah.

Danielle Pletka: Because you really do want to see what Joe Biden's mettle is. And that is, I think for Putin, the best way to test him. And also now is the best moment, because now is a moment when Biden is preoccupied by domestic issues, trying to spend your hard earned tax dollars and mine, and pretty much everybody else on the planet's, in order to reshape the economy of the United States for the next 100 years. He does not want to deal with Russian threats. He does not want to deal with Russian problems, whether they're in Ukraine or they're in Colonial Pipeline-

Marc Thiessen: He wants strategic stability.

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10 Danielle Pletka: He wants strategic stability. So I think that now is a great moment and I'll be very interested to watch this space.

Marc Thiessen: Yeah. So Biden said that he wants a predictable relationship with Russia. So look for unpredictability. Putin is going to test him, and this is going to have implications because we always look at these issues through stovepipes. All right, this is Russia policy as distinct from China policy as distinct from Iran policy as distinct from terrorism policy. Guess what? The leader of North Korea is watching the summit, is watching what Putin does next. So is Xi Jinping in China. So are the leaders of Iran. So are the leaders of al Qaeda and ISIS. So are the leaders of all of our adversaries around the world. And we need to show strength because weakness is provocative and there's going to be a test coming and we better pass it.

Danielle Pletka: Well, I certainly hope we do. And I think everybody hopes we do. Nobody roots for failure in the White House, no matter who is sitting there, at least they oughtn't to.

Marc Thiessen: Especially in foreign policy.

Danielle Pletka: Especially in foreign policy. So here is something we haven't yet talked about, but I think it's an important coda to this discussion. And that is that in the G7 meeting, there was not that much talk, at least publicly, about Russia. And there was a lot of talk about China. China made its way into the communique. China-

Marc Thiessen: Barely.

Danielle Pletka: Barely is right, but you beat me to it. What did you think about the stuff on China?

Marc Thiessen: So they failed to challenge China in any meaningful way. The number one thing that the Biden administration said publicly, that they wanted to get out of the communique was a condemnation of China's use of Uighur slave labor, and they couldn't get it.

Danielle Pletka: Couldn't get it specifically. They got a condemnation of it... they weren't allowed to mention China.

Marc Thiessen: Give me a break. All the people using slave labor out there, wink, wink, Beijing. I mean, come on. Give me a break.

Danielle Pletka: No I know, it's a gutless, it's a gutless moment.

Marc Thiessen: And that's because ... again, why, is Germany always the linchpin of weakness everywhere? I mean, Germany is kissing up to Vladimir Putin with their pipeline. Germany was fighting the Uighur language because of their trade and investment deals with Beijing. And then they've got this talk of coming up with an alternative to the Chinese Belt and Road Initiative. They forgot that Italy is part of the Belt and Road Initiative, that Italy signed a memorandum of understanding-

Danielle Pletka: Exactly.

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11 Marc Thiessen: ... with them. They're part of it. So Italy is going to be part of the answer to the initiative, which it signed up to and is a part of? P. J. O'Rourke described our European allies during the Cold War as Euroweenies, right? The Euroweenies were always capitulating to the Soviet Union and now they're capitulating to China. So the idea that this was the big move in the G7 summit was going to be to have a coalition of the world's democracies against autocracy, right? And yeah, all of them have their hands in the pocket of the autocrat.

Danielle Pletka: Well, no, that's exactly right. I mean, fundamentally our European allies are mercantilist before they are lovers of democracy. And that has long been the case.

Marc Thiessen: Just as long as we protect them.

Danielle Pletka: Right. Right. Well, NATO is not going to protect them for long if they don't spend the money they need to spend.

Marc Thiessen: That's what Donald Trump was saying.

Danielle Pletka: Oh, Marc.

Marc Thiessen: Oh, you sound just like Donald Trump.

Danielle Pletka: Shut up.

Marc Thiessen: That's my new attack on you Dany is, "That sounds like something Donald Trump would say."

Danielle Pletka: Our late boss used to say, "I would write you a letter, but I don't know how to spell [noise]" And with that elegant note folks, hey, to tease, we've got a great podcast for you as well next week on critical race theory, something super interesting and a very, very interesting interview as well. So don't forget to listen. Share your comments with us. Review, subscribe, share with your friends. Thanks for listening.

Marc Thiessen: Take care.

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