The Duran Podcast
Blinken warns China. Sanctions, Proxy War and Regime Change
All right, Alexandra. Let's talk about Blinken's visit to China and the the viral moment that is that is being shared all over social media is the people that person that came to greet to greet Blinken at the airport. And it is it is fun to to see that video. It's gone viral and it's and everyone's joking about it. But it does show a lot. It does really reveal a lot as to as to what to expect in this meeting between Blinken and his Chinese counterparts. So let's let's talk about it. Blinken is is the bad cop. Yellen, a couple of weeks ago was the good cop and Blinken is coming to deliver and ultimate home to the Chinese. What are your thoughts? Well, the Chinese are absolutely furious about it. Now I've been speaking to people like Sofia Midgift who of course keeps track of things in China and opinion there. And she says that Chinese social media has been on fire about this. The Chinese media generally has been on fire about this. I've seen echoes of this in global times and others. The Chinese feel that yet again, we've had a situation where Xi Jinping was persuaded by the Biden administration to come to San Francisco. He had that meeting with Biden back in November. It looked for a time as if things, you know, steps have been taken to steady the ship. And what's happened instead is that as the weeks have passed, the US has been pressing forward with its various policies. We've had the TikTok ban. We've had the army of Taiwan. People overlook that these are important parts of this package. This has just passed, passed Congress on Saturday. The seizure of the $5 billion of Russian assets in the United States is also relevant to this, because of course, if the United States can seize Russian assets and give itself the legal power to do that, then of course you can do the same to Chinese assets. Don't forget that. So I mean, that's something that the Chinese have also taken note of. And then of course we've had this astonishing set of briefings that have been given to the Wall Street Journal and to the Financial Times, which say that if the Chinese don't basically stop their trade with Russia, stop providing Russia with all, you know, all of these machine tools and chips and all of that. Then the US will start imposing sanctions on the Chinese financial system. And the Chinese are absolutely furious about that. They say that once again, the United States is showing its duplicity and its hypocrisy. Nothing like this was mentioned to Xi Jinping when he went to San Francisco in November, which he'd been certainly reluctant for a time if you remembered, even to go there. But the Americans have sweet talk the Chinese and now they're coming back and they're making all these threats. And the Chinese are making it very clear that if Blinken does indeed come along with these threats and these demands and this kind of ultimatum, then the Chinese are not going to accept it. They're going to push back. There's even apparently comments on Chinese social media asking why Blinken was allowed to come to China at all, that after those briefings that appeared in the Wall Street Journal and the Financial Times, China should have withdrawn the invitation. So, you know, that's the kind of mood that there is in China at the moment and the fact that he's not being well received at the airport is a minor thing. The fact that Xi Jinping appears to be on a tour to Chongqing in the far west of China, which presumably means that he isn't going to be in Beijing to meet Blinken. I don't know whether a meeting with Blinken was ever planned. Well, that might also be interesting too. But on top of all of that, the Chinese have now issued a 3,000 word position paper setting up where they want relations with the US to go. And it is clearly intended to put the Chinese in a position where when they meet with Blinken, they have. They're able to go on the attack. And that's presumably what's going to happen. This is going to be a very, very stormy and angry meeting between the Americans of the Chinese. All right, so you've mentioned in a past video how the trade with Russia narrative is the cover story. The real reason for this, this trip and this ultimatum from Blinken in the Biden White House is to basically tell China to knock it off, knock it off with bricks knock it off with the SEO. All of your alternative financial systems and your alternative institutions and the multipolar world, knock it off or else. How does China react to that? I imagine that even if China gives an inch of ground. I've lost this game of chicken. That's really what we have going on here. It really is a game of chicken. It's the US saying, I dare you. I'm coming to China and I am daring you to go against us to not listen to us and to go your to go your own way and do all these things that you're doing. I dare you to go ahead and do that. If you do that, then we're going to unleash sanctions on you. What is going to be the China, the Chinese reaction and this is just a quick note, just a quick note. This also is relative to TikTok because TikTok in a way is the Biden White House saying either sell us TikTok, divest from TikTok or we're shutting it down. If China does divest from TikTok, then the US is going to ask for more and more and more from China. There's a lot of moving pieces here with this game of chicken. The Chinese are not going to give an inch and they've already said as much. They understand fully well that this business about the rush of Chinese trade. The scale of which there's a good article actually about this in the financial times, the scale of which any way is overstated actually. I mean, it's risen an awful lot, but it's risen to the level that you would expect between two such big economies. China Russia trade was artificially low for a very, very long time because the Russians prefer to trade with Europe. Now that that's ended, it's basically Chinese Russia trade is rising to its natural level. And that's all that there is to say about that. Obviously the Russians are able to buy chips and machine tools from China and they will continue to do so. But lots of countries buy chips and machine tools. There are lots of these things the Russians can make machine tools themselves. They've got a major increasing their machine tools industry very fast. This is all this is all a completely fake narrative again. It's a narrative constructed to justify sanctions and the Chinese, I think, believe that sanctions are coming. You remember, it was about a year ago when the US began to sanction Chinese officials. That was the time when we coined the expression the escalatory escalator that the Americans were starting a sanctions to get to start sanctions and from that moment on the sanctions would get stronger and stronger. Now, it looks like they're going to start sanctioning Chinese banks, which the Chinese expect to happen. I mean, that's, I think, their assumption that that's inevitable now. So what the Chinese are going to do is a number of things. Firstly, they're stockpiling. They are buying gold. They are buying every conceivable thing that you can buy that their economy would need for the next year or two commodities. That's why prices of commodities are rising and rising so fast. Secondly, they're going to get closer to the Russians because it makes sense because Russia is their way of applying pressure on the Americans. That's the second thing. And the third thing they're going to do is they're going to push on even harder building up those global and financial trading systems that they have been talking about. And we've just heard news that Xi Jinping intends to attend the BRICS summit in Kazan, where the paperwork in Russia, where the basic outlines of this plan are going to be put together. So that's what's going to happen. And I think the Chinese feel both incredibly angry because again, they feel that they were deceived by the administration back in November of the San Francisco summit. But I think they also feel confident that over time, they can win through. What about the 8 billion to Taiwan? Is the Biden White House, is that their way of putting pressure or exerting leverage over China as blinking goes to the China for meetings? I think this is part of an overall plan to create a militarily strong Taiwan, which the Biden administration believes can resist China. I think it is as ambitious as that. I don't think this is just a mechanism for pressure. I think the long term plan is to have Taiwan declare independence from China, secede from China. It's going to be protected by the US fleet. It's going to have powerful armed forces. And the hope again, the anticipation is that Taiwan will be so strong that it can resist the Chinese military and that will create a political crisis in China, leading eventually to regime change there. And by the way, there's been an article in, I think it was foreign affairs by a man called Pottingjuk, who was a former deputy national security adviser. I think in George W Bush's time, I may be wrong about that. And he's actually said that the policy should not be managing the relationship with China. It is achieving victory over China in effect regime change. So that's what the agenda is. I mean, it's the same agenda that we've seen with Russia. It's failed spectacularly with Russia, but it is being attempted this time with China. Yeah, sounds very familiar to the whole project Ukraine. It's exactly like like project Ukraine. They just don't learn, do they? Before we wrap up the video, can you address the, I don't know if you saw the article, I forgot where it was, I think it was, it was a defense, a military or defense publication. I know the one where they talk. Okay, so you know the one that I'm referring to, I just don't remember the publication, but, yeah, it went viral though. I mean, a lot of people started to talk about it because it essentially said that from a military point of view that if there was to be a conflict between the US and China, basically the US would win, because China doesn't have any military experience. It doesn't have the experience of fighting wars of which the US has a lot of experience fighting wars. What are your thoughts on that article and the release of that article and it's really drummed up a lot of discussion and debate. The first thing to say is, I mean, the very fact that a potential with China is being discussed in that way is incredibly alarming. I mean, it tells you that some people in the United States actually won't walk with China. I mean, that's, that's the only way I can explain it because this is this, you know, saying, you know, we shouldn't be afraid of China because we can fight them, and we can beat them our military so much better than their military that you know, let's plan and think and talk with China, and we shouldn't be scared of them on the contrary, they should be scared of us. And then, of course, we have the next paradox because we hear all the time about how aggressive and militaristic the Chinese supposedly are. But the reason we're so much stronger than the Chinese is not because we've got better weapons than they do, though we do actually think that our weapons are at least somewhat the more indeed better than their weapons. But the Chinese do have a lot of capability, we accept that. But nonetheless, we mustn't worry about that because though the Chinese are aggressive, you know, they're aggressive but they've never fought wars. We are not aggressive, we're defensive, but we've fought lots and lots and lots of wars, I mean, already you see the contradiction there perhaps, but we are enormously experienced and strong, and we know how to fight wars and the Chinese don't. Now, all I will say is, yes, we have fought a lot of wars, the United States has fought lots of wars recently. They haven't gone so well. They haven't been against an adversary like China. And the nearest approximation to a war that the United States, it hasn't exactly fought it, but it's fought it through a proxy against a peer adversary is the war against Russia, because Ukraine, very different type of war, I suspect, from the one that would be fought in the Pacific. But that war hasn't gone well. The Americans micro managed and planned Ukraine's offensive, for example last year, and we saw that turn out disastrously. The United States provided all that expensive kit to the Ukrainians, and it didn't do so well against the Russians. So, you know, again, we have all this talk about how strong we are, how weak they are, how competent we are, how incompetent they are. They're presumably corrupt, but just wait before long, we'll get that too. We've got all of that, they're demoralized, they're weak, they're ineffective, they're badly led, we're none of those things. And then, of course, it turns out when we are in a war that none of that is true, but by then it's too late. All right, we will end the video there. 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