WTH is going on in Beijing? Josh Rogin on how Covid has forever changed the US-China relationship
Episode #93 | March 11, 2021 | Danielle Pletka, Marc Thiessen, and Josh Rogin
Danielle Pletka: Hi, I'm Danielle Pletka.
Marc Thiessen: I'm Marc Thiessen.
Danielle Pletka: Welcome to our podcast, What the Hell is Going On? Marc, what the hell is going on this week?
Marc Thiessen: Well, we are talking about China and we are talking about China's responsibility for the pandemic. And we're talking with Josh Rogin, a colleague of mine at the Washington Post, and a friend of both of ours who's got a great new book called Chaos Under Heaven, talking about Trump, Xi Jinping, and the Chinese challenge that we face. It's a terrific book, and it exposes a lot of issues that we really need to worry about when it comes to the future of the US-China relationship, which is literally the most important relationship for the future of world peace, future of public health, future of freedom on the world. What do you think, Dany?
Danielle Pletka: Well, first of all, I don't want to spoil Josh's show. He's going to talk about some of the scoops he has in the book, which are absolutely fascinating, about Trump administration policy, about Biden, about what the Chinese were thinking, about the lies, all of that good stuff is up ahead. I think that part of the problem that we have right now, and it's not just about China, is that as the threat from Xi Jinping and the Chinese Communist Party crystallizes, we have proven ourselves incapable of looking at this with anything other than political goggles.
Marc Thiessen: Speak for yourself.
Danielle Pletka: Well, okay. All right, I will. Unlike beer goggles, which are so awesome, political goggles just mean that Trump says bad, must be good. Biden says good, must be good. We are having a simplistic discussion while Rome proverbially burns over there. And the Chinese threat, not just to our health, but to the health of its own people, to international institutions, to our geo-strategic dominance, to the global commons through which trillions of dollars of trade go, all of this is getting worse with every passing day, and we're all busy just having some sort of sorority girl fight.
Marc Thiessen: So, here's my frustration with that, which I agree with you.
2 Danielle Pletka: Wait, wait, wait, wait. What, what? You what? What'd you say?
Marc Thiessen: Even a blind squirrel finds an acorn once in a while, Dany. I agree with you. And here's the frustration, which is that this virus for the first time provided clarity to the American people on the threat posed by Communist China and the lack of freedom in China and the way the Chinese people treat their own people and the way they treat their neighbors, because it came to hurt us here at home. It meant that hundreds of thousands of Americans died. Half a million Americans died, millions of people died around the world, and millions more were infected because the Chinese government is a lying, corrupt, authoritarian/totalitarian regime. If this virus had broken out in Taiwan, it would not have spread around the world the way it did because the Taiwanese government, which is accountable and democratic, would have immediately swung into action and been transparent about what it knew and shared that information with the world. And we would have all rallied together to try and contain this virus before it spread like a wildfire.
Marc Thiessen: And instead, the Chinese government lied. They denied that it was being transmitted through human transmission. They punished doctors who shared information about the virus with the world. They wouldn't let us have CDC researchers come to China to investigate. It was just pure obstruction and lying because they were afraid that they were going to get blamed for it. And instead, they let the small fire that started in Wuhan spread until it was uncontrollable.
Marc Thiessen: The lesson of that is that the lack of freedom in China is the reason why for the last year, we've been locked in our homes, where people have lost their jobs, where people have lost family members to illness, it's a direct result of the lack of freedom in China. And for a moment we had this moment of clarity, and then politics took it over.
Danielle Pletka: I think there's another aspect of this that we should talk about that gets no scrutiny. And one of our colleagues at AEI has done great work on some of the weird anomalies that we haven't talked about. For example, everybody says, "Oh, no. China has really beaten the virus." But they are still having lockdowns, they are still canceling holiday festivals, they are still canceling flights. So, in fact, there's something going on there.
Marc Thiessen: It's almost like it's California.
Danielle Pletka: Do not get me started.
Marc Thiessen: Xi Jing-Newsom.
Danielle Pletka: That's going to be a thing, people. Look for it in a column soon. So, on March 8th, Derek Scissors had a post on AEI's blog, and one of the things he talks about is that China supposedly had their Sinovac vaccine ready before us. They've got endless numbers of hands available to dispense it. And yet, they have inoculated fewer people than we have. That's number one. What's going on? What don't we know about this vaccine that they don't want to share? Then on top of that, why are they so focused on exporting the vaccine and not using it at home? Also, he goes through the data on this and says that they're going to hit 25 million
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org
3 doses administered a week. That's the Chinese Communist Party's goal, but they've only administered 50 million doses so far. Again, what's going on? What don't we understand? I think there are a lot of those kinds of questions that aren't getting answered.
Marc Thiessen: I'm going to throw it out there, Dany, and this is going to be a controversial statement, but the Chinese might be lying.
Danielle Pletka: Yeah, but the question is this, okay? Everybody wants to compartmentalize, "Oh, well, yeah, of course. Maybe they lied to the World Health Organization. Maybe they're lying about the lab. Maybe they lied about the wet market. Maybe they lied about this." But actually, I think they're lying about everything.
Marc Thiessen: Because that's what communists do, Dany. I mean, true. It is. And would you take the Sinovac vaccine?
Danielle Pletka: No. I've been offered it.
Marc Thiessen: Would you put that in your arm?
Danielle Pletka: No, I would not.
Marc Thiessen: From the people who brought you the virus, here comes the vaccine.
Danielle Pletka: Well, also they will not share their efficacy data with anybody. They have not shared it. And if you want the link, we'll throw it in the transcript, go and read the piece because Derek hyperlinks every single one of his claims. He's a pretty serious economist, so he doesn't like all that airy fairy, national security stuff that we talk about, and start to think very seriously about this. If someone lies about one thing, they're probably lying about more than just one thing.
Marc Thiessen: And it's probably true. They're probably lying about what they're doing with the Uighurs and freedom in Hong Kong and everything else.
Danielle Pletka: So, we need a policy.
Marc Thiessen: Exactly. So, what it comes down to is that this is all part of a whole. You're right. You hit the nail on the head when you talked about compartmentalizing. We can't compartmentalize it. The same regime that lies about its it's persecution of the Uighurs, the same regime that is suppressing freedom in Hong Kong, all those instincts are why this virus spread to the United States and why they weren't able to control it, because they lie, and they repress, and they use the power of government to protect a small cadre of elites and they don't give a damn about their own people. And they certainly give a damn about our people.
Marc Thiessen: And so, if it's all part of a larger whole, then we need a larger whole of a policy to confront this. And as I alluded to at the beginning, we stopped criticizing China in the second half of last year, because it was seen as deflection from Trump. Trump was responsible for the virus. Trump was responsible for the pandemic
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4 here. And so, if you blame China, you're just deflecting from Trump. You don't want to put the blame where it lies. But we all know, the election's over now. We can put the political talking points down. Of course, China's responsible. And now that Trump has gone and he's off the stage and we've got a new administration, let's put the blame where it belongs. Let's come up with a policy to confront the Chinese regime on all these fronts, because it's going to happen again.
Danielle Pletka: That's exactly right. I think those are the words of wisdom that we need to stick with.
Marc Thiessen: Can you say that again?
Danielle Pletka: Marc has uttered words of wisdom.
Danielle Pletka: So, we've got a terrific guest, as we promised. Josh Rogin is a columnist, as is Marc, for the Washington Post. His book, Chaos Under Heaven: Trump, Xi and the Battle for the 21st Century came out this week. It's topping bestseller lists at Amazon. It's got great, great reviews, including from Marc and me, really a worthwhile, very seriously reported read. Josh is also a CNN political analyst. He's worked for Bloomberg. He's worked for the Daily Beast. He's worked for Foreign Policy. He's worked on Congressional Quarterly. Maybe he can't hold down a job. I hope he keeps that Washington Post gig, damn. He's a very experienced journalist and you guys are going to enjoy this a lot.
Marc Thiessen: Here's Josh. Josh, welcome back to the podcast.
Josh Rogin: Great to be back.
Marc Thiessen: Well, so you've got this great new book out called Chaos Under Heaven. Tell us about the book and why you wrote it.
Josh Rogin: Well, basically in 2016, I was at the Washington Post and there were about 50 or 60 journalists who were working full time on the Russia story. And I looked around, I'm like, "Man, I'm not going to be able to compete with that. I'd better come up with another gig, another idea here." And so, I had been covering the US-China relationship for about 14 years or so before that. I went to my boss, editorial editor, Fred Hyatt. And I said to him, I'm like, "Listen, I think this China story, I think that's going to be a big thing. We should probably get on top of that. What do you think?"
Josh Rogin: And he said, "What do you need?" And I said, "Well, I need the time and resources to report out a very sort of complex story that will shortly require a lot of travel." He said, "Okay, you got it." And just like that, my bosses had put their trust and faith in me to really dig into the US-China relationship. And then something crazy happens and Donald Trump got elected president, and that threw this entire issue into what I call just an endless series of chaos, hence the title of the book, Chaos Under Heaven.
Josh Rogin: And the Trump presidency was so disruptive in so many ways for so many issues,
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5 and all I tried to do was cover the China part of it best I could at the time. And then when it came time to write the book, do another 300 or so additional interviews to figure out what happened in this vital relationship at this crucial time. And I came away with a lot of insights, but two big, broad ones. One is that over the course of these four years, our country, our government, slowly, our society and our institutions, all started to wake up to the twin realization that the US-China relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the world, and that the Chinese Communist Party, in its current iteration, presents enormous challenges outside of its own borders to our security, prosperity, freedom, and our public health.
Josh Rogin: And this awakening has happened in different ways, in different institutions, on different schedules, and in academia and in tech and in Wall Street. When these sectors started to interact and started to confront these issues, it didn't always go well, and when the FBI came knocking on their door with national security concerns, that didn't always go well either. And lording all over this was the sort of political and policy dysfunction that the Trump administration wrought on our country and then bam, the pandemic hit.
Danielle Pletka: So, building up to what is already a really interesting, important and very seriously reported story, which is the kind of book that we love. So, you have a bunch of pretty explosive stories in the book about how the beginning of the virus crisis unrolls between the United States and China. Talk a little bit about that.
Josh Rogin: Yeah. To be clear, I would rather have had no pandemic, despite that it would have hurt the book and the story. You know what I mean? And the timing was significant because it brought the China issue into the lives and into the homes of every single, not only American, but person around the world. But if you just think about where we were when the pandemic started, this was a time after three years of a tumultuous US-China relationship, they were on the brink of a detente. They signed the deal. The trade deal, whether you love it or hate it, or feel agnostic about it, was signed on January 15th in the White House, and the President of the United States announced a new era of great power relations with China, where we're all going to live in peace and coexistence, that's what he said.
Josh Rogin: And two days later, the information started pouring in from his national security folks, "Hey, we ve got a problem here," and you can understand in that time and space, why the president didn't want to hear it. He didn't want to deal with it. He didn't want to tank the airlines or the economy, and therefore his reelection chances, but the evidence kept piling up. And then, when the crucial decision points came, there was Chinese President Xi Jinping, on the phone to tell him, "Don't worry, nothing to see here." And what I had added in the book was a lot of additional reporting on two crucial calls in February and March, respectively, between the Chinese president and President Trump, where the Chinese president applied our president with a bunch of lies, like the virus will go away when it gets warmer, that herbal medicine works, that they had it under control, et cetera, et cetera.
Josh Rogin: And we don't know really if Trump believed it or if he just wanted to believe it,
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org
6 but he kept saying it over and over internally and in public, and when he said to the American people, "Hey, a lot of people are saying it's going to go away when it gets warmer," he didn't tell them a lot of people was the Chinese president who was in the process of covering up their government's tragic missteps and tragic handling of the virus at first. And the ironic thing is that eventually, Trump figured it out, but by then it was too late. When I first heard Kung Flu, I thought, "Oh, what's the big deal?"
Josh Rogin: Not only was that supremely unhelpful in terms of politicizing the issue, because now we're talking about the names of the flu rather than solving the pandemic or finding the origin, but on top of that, the president was very angry that his good friend Xi Jinping had lied to him. And that led to a worsening of the relationship even further. And so, the pandemic tragically removed all doubt in the minds of Americans and people around the world that our fates and China's are intertwined in a way that we can never really separate. At the same time, the bungled handling, first by the Chinese leadership, and then by our own leadership, served to only drive our countries farther apart.
Danielle Pletka: When I read your book, the word bungle doesn't seem to be the right one to characterize the Chinese response. Lying, cover up, disinformation, repression, misinformation, and manipulation of the World Health Organization, those seem to be the right phrases. You want to spend a moment on that?
Josh Rogin: Yeah. Crimes were committed. I think crimes were committed, in addition to the crimes against humanity they're already committing and the crimes against our country in terms of theft and espionage that they've been committing. You look at what they did by not sharing the data, by disappearing the whistleblowers, by really misleading the world about the nature of this virus, and how dangerous it was. People died off of those lies, a lot of people, okay, and that doesn't excuse the mistakes that our government made, which were many, and in many ways, continue to this day. But China was the first mover, and they had that advantage. They had more knowledge. Now, there are lots of other allegations that we really need to get to the bottom too, which is what are they hiding about the origin of the virus?
Josh Rogin: And then also, is the science that they're putting out credible and legitimate, and there are credible allegations that the Chinese government is manipulating the science even to today in order to defend their political interests, which tells you all you need to know about how much they care about our public health. So, yeah, I think there are serious, serious crimes that deserve truth, justice, and accountability at some point, and we're only beginning to uncover what those were.
Josh Rogin: And if you just think about the opportunity and then talk about holding back the PPE and lording it over country's heads. One of the stories in the book is about how the Chinese diplomats told American diplomats, "If you don't shut up about our handling of the coronavirus, you're not going to get your masks. You want your masks?" And that kind of thing is also criminal and horrendous and deserves sunlight and accountability. And just think of the missed opportunity for the Chinese leadership, with all this power and all these resources, and they could have really done something great for the world and showed the world that even
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7 China under Xi Jinping could be a responsible world leader, but they showed us the exact opposite.
Marc Thiessen: So, you mentioned earlier that Trump was essentially parroting what Xi Jinping was telling him, but keep in mind that we're recording this in the second week of March. A year ago, today, Dr. Fauci was saying, "Don't wear masks. If you're young and you're healthy, you want to go on a cruise ship, go on a cruise ship. The risk to the United States is relatively low." Our public health officials screwed this up because they were using a flu surveillance system to see if the virus was spreading, to see how many people were reporting to hospitals with respiratory illness, when most of it was asymptomatic spread. And so, they weren't catching it. So, to some extent, Trump was listening to what Dr. Fauci was telling him, not just what Xi Jinping was telling him. And once it became clear that Xi Jinping was lying, he turned on China pretty hard, didn't he?
Josh Rogin: Yeah, that's exactly right. And the book goes into this in some excruciating detail at the beginning, even Trump's health experts were not taking the threat seriously because a lot of them, including Dr. Fauci, by the way, had a lot of experience working with the Chinese scientists who were doing a lot of this research and they were funding them, and they had relationships with them. And that's not an allegation, that's just an easily, publicly checkable set of facts, okay? And it doesn't mean that the lab did it, but it doesn't mean that the lab didn't do it, and we can get into that. But there was a resistance, amongst Fauci, the WHO doctors, and a lot of American scientists who work with these Chinese researchers to believing that anything could be wrong with what the information that the Chinese were putting out scientifically.
Josh Rogin: But the reporting bears out, not just mine, I'm talking about all of the reporting done by hundreds of journalists and dozens of news organizations, that the Chinese government was manipulating the science from the beginning and withholding the science. And it's not the fault of that nice Chinese researcher necessarily who you knew since the eighties, and you had all that fun with hunting for bats in Yunnan back in the day. That person in not in charge of what information gets out, that person has got a general or colonel standing behind them, okay? And that colonel has got a party boss standing behind him who's got Xi Jinping standing behind him, okay? And so, the health officials in the Trump administration didn't understand how the Chinese Communist Party system works. Now some people did, there were national security officials that did, but they didn't win the day, at least not at first.
Josh Rogin: And then you had the political people who were like, "Listen, this is really bad politics for us. We ve got to hope and pray this thing works out and downplay it as much as possible." And so, all of those voices, including the Chinese president s, are getting garbled inside of President Trump's head and mixed up in ways that we can't really understand, and then come out of his mouth in garbled ways that we can't decipher. And that garbage in, garbage out kind of dynamic repeated every single day for months, resulted in the terrible set of policies. So, there was plenty of blame to go around to be sure.
Marc Thiessen: And so eventually Trump realized that Xi Jinping was lying to him, that this was much worse, that they had covered it up, and all the rest of it, and he really put
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8 the blame squarely on China. And for a while, I mean, the public polling in March and April of last year was the biggest bipartisan sentiment against China we've probably ever had, in terms of recognition of their responsibility. And then something happened, which was that we were in an election year and the Democratic Party had an interest in laying the blame of the pandemic on Trump.
Marc Thiessen: And so, we have this bipartisan moment where we all agree that China needs to be held responsible. And then it became, well, if you're blaming China, you're deflecting from Trump's responsibility. And all of a sudden that dissipated. One, do you agree with that? And two, do you think now that now that Trump is gone, we can finally get back to blaming China?
Josh Rogin: Maybe. Listen, I watched as soon as the trade deal was rendered moot, because who cares about $50 billion worth of soybeans when we just spent $6 trillion on pandemic relief, okay? The trade issue really turned out not to be the most important thing in the US-China relationship, though, I could've told you that four years ago, but Trump realized it pretty late. And once he realized that the pandemic was tanking his reelection chances, then he was blaming China for tanking his reelection chances, and he was taking it out on them.
Josh Rogin: But you're right, at the same exact time, the polling kept showing that Americans all over the country, Democrats and Republicans were like, "Oh, wait a second. We ve got a problem here. And a rising China is presenting a challenge to our lives now that we don't think our government is responding to." And the Biden people smartly actually, realized that kind of midstream and pivoted from calling Trump too tough on China to calling Trump too weak on China and totally changed their attitude, and that's sort of where we see them today is recognizing where the political winds are blowing.
Josh Rogin: And at the same time in Congress, what Nancy Pelosi did was she told her members not to cooperate with any Republicans on any China-related projects, because she didn't want to deflect any of the attention from Trump's mishandling, and she thought blaming China was just something that played better for Republicans. I remember one night in late February, I was about to break a story, not a big story, but what I thought was an important story about a China taskforce that Democrats and Republicans had been working on for a year, represented by 20 committees, and the staffers had extensive rules and procedures. They were going to have meetings and hearings, and it was all about making the China issue bipartisan and elevating it in Congress so that everyone could figure it out. They were going to bring in the health committee people, and the education committee people, so everyone could get on the same page on this China thing.
Josh Rogin: My friends who worked on the Hill were really proud of this for a year, Democrats and Republicans alike. So, I interviewed the House Republican leader. I interviewed top Democrats. I had the article all written, and then right before they were going to launch it, I got a call from my Democratic staffer friend, and he says, "It's off." I'm like, "What do you mean, it's off?" He's like, "I can't get into it, but it's off." I later found out that Pelosi said, "No, we're not cooperating with the Republicans on anything China-related."
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9 Josh Rogin: Republicans ended up launching the taskforce a couple months later, but there was no good policy reason that they tanked that effort other than that both sides are guilty of politicizing the China issue.
Danielle Pletka: I do want to talk about the politics, not because I think that the politics should be what guides us, but because I think that this is the prism through which you write a lot of this. It, of course, ends up making the problem us, not them. As you rightly pointed out at the beginning, we've got concentration camps. We've got two Canadians who have been imprisoned in retaliation for a Chinese official, a theoretically private sector official, being arrested in Canada. We've got all sorts of human rights violations in Hong Kong. We've got threats against Taiwan. But of course, all we can ever talk about is Trump, Biden, Trump, Biden, Trump, Biden, Trump, Biden. So, let's talk about Trump for one more sec.
Josh Rogin: I mean, the whole book's about Trump, in a way.
Marc Thiessen: It's in the headline.
Danielle Pletka: So, you seem to talk a lot to Matt Pottinger. That's just my inference here from some of the quotes.
Danielle Pletka: And Matt, who is a guy a lot of us respect and I think very highly of, who was a senior National Security Council official in the Trump administration and an Asia specialist, former Marine, great guy, says, you say, "Oh, well, we had a China strategy in the Trump administration. It's just that Trump didn't follow it." Talk a little about that, because I think it's important.
Josh Rogin: Right. I mean, basically what I say is that you always hear the same thing, "Oh, they didn't have a China strategy. They didn't try to have a China strategy." What I say in the book is that, actually, they had several. It depends who you talk to and on what day, and not all of the strategies were written down and not all of them Trump knew about. He knew about some of them, and he wandered through them with varying levels of intentionality. This was sort of the factional setup, the factional infighting that ravaged especially the Trump administration, it was all about the factional politics. The factions formed assorted alliances that evolved based on overlapping interests over time. Because there was so much turnover and churn, the factions were constantly changing, and occasionally they would have champions, like Pence, or Bolton, or somebody, to represent them, and sometimes they didn't.
Josh Rogin: So, when you look at something, just to take the trade war for one thing, everyone reported on the trade war like it was all about Lighthizer and Mnuchin meeting with Liu He to talk about soybeans and "How many soybeans are we going to get, and how many soybeans are they going to get?" But there was a lot more going on behind the scenes, and Pottinger was right in the middle of this. What they were doing is they were trying to shift the government, not the administration, the beast that is all of these agencies, towards a more competitive China policy, while keeping an eye on the politics above them to see what the room was for that, to see how much space they had to maneuver, and that feeling of what could be done was set by the president. It changed a lot, and if he was happy with Xi one time, then maybe he shut down ZTE. That's a real
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10 example. If he was really unhappy with Xi, well, now Huawei can be sanctioned.
Josh Rogin: That's kind of a capricious way to run a strategy, but it's just the way it played out, and there were enough people inside the system tuned into it that they were trying to steer it in the direction that they desired. Then inside each of these agencies, you had competitions of their own between people who had been fighting for a tougher China policy their whole careers, but never really had an opportunity because of bureaucratic intransigence and the manipulation and control of the China issue by the China hands. One of the big themes of the book is that we can't leave the China issue to the China hands, right? One, because guess what? Their 40-year plan to liberalize China didn't work. We have to be honest about that, but two, because the China challenge touches everything. It touches academia and our health and our markets and our Silicon Valley tech companies. So, everyone's got to get involved. Everyone's got to get on the same page.
Josh Rogin: So that's a long way of saying that I think that the conclusion that I come to at the end of the book is that the hardliners and the national security people tended to win out. Okay? Their strategy ended up being the one that was the strategy at the end of the Trump administration. We saw that in a million different ways in Wall Street restrictions and sanctions on companies that were committing atrocities and really closing down the Confucius Institutes on a broad scale. These are big things that weren't necessarily going to happen, that Trump wasn't onboard with even at the end of 2019, but by the end of 2020, all these things were flying at full mast.
Josh Rogin: That's the handoff that they made to the Biden administration, and so that's to say that that strategy sort of won out, in a sense, but it didn't win out because the hardliners and the national security people had superior Machiavellian tactics. It played out that way because the Chinese Communist Party of Xi Jinping proved them right. They didn't give Trump what he needed on a trade deal so that he could run on it. They didn't listen to him when he asked them for favors. They ended up acting so poorly that it ended up affecting all of our public health. So, all of a sudden, the hardliners were in a position where the President of United States said, "You know what? I guess you guys were right. I guess we've got to be tougher on these guys," and that's exactly what happened.
Marc Thiessen: Well, let's talk about the origin of the virus, which we still don't know with certainty where it came from. The popular story that was widely accepted for a long time is that it started at the seafood market in Wuhan, and you broke last year the story about the Wuhan cables, where the Institute of Virology in Wuhan, where they were asking for help because they couldn't function safely. There's speculation that this may have come from a Chinese lab, not created by the Chinese government as a bioweapon, but just through lab accident or something like that. Tell us a little bit. Remind our listeners about the Wuhan cables. How has that story developed since you broke it?
Josh Rogin: Right. Well, it's developing all the time. I'll start at the end. Yesterday, I broke a story for the Washington Post that said that the Biden administration checked on some of the Trump administration's claims about this Wuhan lab, the Wuhan Institute of Virology, the subject of the cables. The world's leading bat
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11 coronavirus research center just coincidentally apparently happened to be the exact spot where the pandemic broke out. But I'll come back to that. What the Biden administration said is that a lot of what the Trump administration put out factually was correct, and there was suspicious activity, undisclosed activity in the lab regarding cooperation with the Chinese military. They didn't disclose all the work on bat coronaviruses, and there was a bunch of sick researchers in the lab in autumn 2019 they never told anybody about, and that's all collected through US intelligence sources.
Josh Rogin: Just to have the Biden team sort of say that that is all true, de-politicizes a ton of this information. Now, they also said, very quickly, in fact, that they're not endorsing the lab accident theory. They don't know how the origin of the virus started. That's true. They don't know. You don't know. I don't know. I'm not claiming to know. But the idea for a year, literally a whole year, that this lab accident theory was some sort of untouchable conspiracy theory really disappears when you sort of just listen to the Biden people, because they have no incentive to promote Trump's conspiracy theory. Quite the opposite. It's actually tougher for them to confirm this stuff and admit that Trump was right about this stuff. But what they say is that Trump went beyond the facts and Pompeo went beyond the facts to say the lab definitely was responsible.
Josh Rogin: So that's where we are. Now, just to take it back now to what you actually asked me, which was about these cables, when I first reported in April 2020 that US diplomats had visited this very lab in 2018, two years prior, and warned of the safety issues and warned that they were doing risky research on bat coronaviruses that they had demonstrated could easily infect humans, that environment, the political environment that we were living in just a year ago, was so toxic and so crazy that it just pushed everybody into their corners. Half the world said, "We believe Trump," and the other half of the world said, "We believe the Chinese government." Neither is a really great, comfortable position to be in, right? Especially at that point in time.
Josh Rogin: But as it turns out, the origin of the coronavirus is not actually a political question. It's more of a scientific question. But in essence, it's a forensic question. Something happened, and we have to figure out what that was. So that's a long way of saying that I think, for understandable reasons, it was really impossible to pick through the theories and the evidence and the claims that were being made by, on the one hand, the Chinese government and its friends and, on the other hand, the Trump administration. But now with Trump gone, it's a kind of actually a little bit easier. What we're finding is that there's a lot of good reasons to look at this lab. Oh, and by the way, the Chinese government walked away... The Chinese CDC specifically disavowed the market theory last May. So that's 10 months ago, but people are still talking about it. But even the Chinese don't think that is the case or are not saying that it is the case anymore.
Danielle Pletka: So, exit question, we've been talking a lot about Trump and talking a lot about the virus. Let's talk a little bit about looking forward. You have a new president. You wrote a piece that I think jives very nicely with the reporting that's been done in the book. The headline just says it all, but I'd really love for you to expand on it. China threw down the gauntlet to the Biden team on day one. You wrote that literally on day one, January 21st, 2021, a day after inauguration. Talk about what
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12 the other geo-strategic challenges are that we face and how China is treating team Biden.
Josh Rogin: Yeah. I mean, they're treating the Chinese communist party, for all of its supposed intelligence and cleverness and skill and bureaucratic blah, blah, blah, makes a lot of bad decisions. And not just bad decisions that kill 2.5 million people, or contributed to the killing of 2.5 million people around the world, but bad decisions in terms of its own interests. The first thing they did when the Biden team got in was they threatened them. And the way that they did that was they sanctioned all the former Trump administration officials who were tough on China, like Pompeo and Robert O'Brian, you name it. Matt Pottinger got sanctioned.
Danielle Pletka: Super Iran-like behavior.
Josh Rogin: Yeah, just call them a bunch of names, and basically said to the Biden people, "Listen, if you continue these policies, we're coming for you."
Marc Thiessen: You just made one less buddy.
Josh Rogin: First of all, it's an economic threat, because the whole point of it is that you can't do any business in China, which is not really going to affect Matt Pottinger, but you could think of a bunch of other officials for whom that threat probably rings true to them. But more than that, they totally misread, not only the political mood here in America, but what's going on inside the Biden team, because it's not as if the Biden team is a monolith on China. And there are people who are pro- engagement, like John Kerry, and there are people who are pro-competition, like Jake Sullivan, and there are people who were more hawkish like Kirk Campbell. And right now, the competition people are winning the day because the politics support that, and because the Biden political team is smart enough to know that that's where the American people are, for a lot of obvious reasons that we just spent a half hour discussing.
Josh Rogin: So, by threatening them, all the Chinese government did was put up a bluff, write a check that they can't cash, and try to strong arm the Biden team, putting them in a position where they can't even acquiesce to the threat, because then they would be acquiescing to the threat and they'd get called out for that. So, it's really kind of doubly stupid on Beijing's part. But nevertheless, this is just really sort of the initial dance. You know what I mean? They're circling each other, they're sniffing around, they're trying to figure out what they're going to do. At some point, they're going to have to sit down, and that's, I think, where the rubber meets the road. And the Biden people are being very cautious about that and meeting with every ally and every person they can think of before they meet with the Chinese in earnest, although they did meet with them on the Iran deal. But when that first sit-down comes, dollars to donuts, the Chinese Communist Party will have a dangle. They're going to come with a dangle. Mark my words. You heard it here first. And whatever that dangle is, it's going to be something that they know the Biden team wants. Is it Iran? Is it climate change? Who knows? The offer of peace and friendship and mutual cooperation and win-win solutions and peaceful coexistence?
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org
13 Danielle Pletka: Those clichés trip off your tongue, don't they? You've been here too long.
Josh Rogin: I've just heard them so many times, and not only out of the mouths of Chinese officials, but out of the mouths of Americans who are working on behalf of those officials. So that will be the test. That will be when we find out what the Biden administration is really made of. Do they take the dangle or do they realize what I think is the obvious truth here, which is that the turn of our country and our partners and allies towards a more realistic, more competitive, more responsive, higher priority given to the issue of a challenge of a rising China should be irreversible. It's not something that we can double back on in exchange for soybeans or a climate promise that will never exist, or even an Iran nuclear deal. This is the most important thing now and we have to get it right, and we can't fall into the trap of being offered smooth relations in exchange for ignoring the values and the interests that our country is built on.
Marc Thiessen: Well, I've got dangle for our listeners, which is buy Josh Rogin's book. It's a great book, he's a great reporter, a great writer, and we're really grateful to you for joining us.
Danielle Pletka: Bestseller on Amazon. Keep selling it. It's a really terrific read. Thank you for joining us.
Josh Rogin: Thank you guys.
Marc Thiessen: So, here's an issue I want to address with you, Dany, at the end. Josh pointed out that one of the lessons of all of this is that the China hands got China wrong and the rise of China wrong. We've discussed on this podcast how the Middle East hands got the Middle East wrong, that the Abraham Accords were achieved because of a repudiation of all the wisdom of the Middle East experts who said that there could be no separate peace with the Israeli peace, and the peace goes through Ramallah and all the rest of it.
Marc Thiessen: We've also discovered that the public health experts got it wrong when it comes to the virus, that they missed the virus because they were using a flu sentinel system that didn't catch asymptomatic spread, they screwed up the testing, they contaminated the lab kits, and they told us that masks
Danielle Pletka: The FDA doesn't work properly.
Marc Thiessen: Yeah. And so, are we having a crisis of expertise? I mean, seriously, on all of these fronts, on every major issue facing us in the last year, the experts, from public health experts to foreign policy experts, have gotten it wrong.
Danielle Pletka: Yeah. No, look, I think that's a very trenchant observation. It's one that's been made more than once over the last few years.
Marc Thiessen: We'll add that to the compilation, trenchant observation. I love this.
Danielle Pletka: Everybody, I want you to look up an important word in Yiddish. Here's a word from our sponsor, Jewish grandmothers everywhere. Look up the word nudnik.
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org
14 Marc Thiessen: There'll be a picture of Dany there.
Marc Thiessen: Can we get back to why I'm right?
Danielle Pletka: Yes, let's get back to why Marc s right.
Marc Thiessen: About my trenchant observation, go ahead and please continue with the praise. Go ahead.
Danielle Pletka: Look, we've talked about the fact that going back to the Iraq war, this has caused a crisis of faith in government and in experts. Our friend, Michael Gove in the UK, who's a senior official now in the Boris Johnson government has talked about that as well in the context of Brexit. But the reality is that people don't trust government, and it's not just Republicans. There's a lot of Democrats, and there is a lack of humility in government. George Bush talked about this, but 9/11 intervened and humility just wasn't on the menu, and it hasn't been on the menu since. That unwillingness to step back and reassess whether we should be on the same path we've been on for 50 years, a hundred years, is really lacking. And the person who epitomizes that for me, and I know you're going to love this. The person who epitomizes is that for me, not just in the Biden administration, but in Washington at all, is John Kerry. He is the guy who gets everything wrong. He's the guy who's wrong about the Middle East, he's wrong about Iran, and I am willing to bet, just as Josh said, that the Chinese are going to dangle some climate thing in order to wrap in the most gullible, the least credible person in this administration, but the most egotistical.
Marc Thiessen: Yep, I couldn't agree with you more. They will dangle something and John Kerry will bite and that is true, but this is I think quite frankly all part and parcel, and taken out of the person of Donald Trump, why we have this rise of populism in this country, is that the experts have gotten so many things wrong. The experts told us that well, free trade is great because there's no net job loss. And the people in Lordstown, Ohio said, "Well, there's a net job loss for us," and the experts, with their charts and graphs and their medical studies, and their years of thesis papers on Middle East and China all say these things that turn out not to be true or not right.
Marc Thiessen: And so, the American people have lost trust in expertise. We have a crisis of expertise in this country, because there's, I think you hit the nail on the head, a lack of humility, a lack of ability to rethink things and just do things the way they've always been done, because that's always the way it's been done. And we had the experts, as Josh was saying who, well, they have these great relationships with Chinese researchers, and they couldn't be not telling them the truth. And this is why the populism that we saw that propelled Donald Trump into office, whether Donald Trump runs again or not, or with somebody else, that populism is going to continue, because there is a large segment of the American public that has just looked at what they've had to go through in the last year and said, "Everybody who says they're an expert got it wrong."
Danielle Pletka: Yep.
Marc Thiessen: Everybody who says they're the expert got it wrong. Well, maybe we had to lock
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org
15 down and we had to shut down every restaurant and ruin everybody's business and all the rest of it, and it's because the China experts got it wrong, the public health experts got it wrong, the government officials who were charged to manage the crisis got it wrong, and we're sick of it. And I think that's going to be a theme of our politics for a long time.
Danielle Pletka: I agree with you wholeheartedly about that. So, folks, if you want to hear more, subscribe, review, send it to your friends, send it to your enemies, send it to your mom, and let us know what you think. Suggestions are welcome. We love hearing from you, and your feedback really means a lot. Thanks for listening.
Marc Thiessen: Thank you.
AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE | 1789 Massachusetts Ave, NW, Washington, DC 20036 | 202.862.5800 | aei.org