The Duran Podcast
Germany's Habeck in China, pushes trade war
All right, Alexander, let's talk about Habic's recent trip, Vice Chancellor and if he's economic minister as well. His recent trip to Beijing, a three-day visit where he planned on seeing the Chinese premier, the Chinese premier snubbed him. I want to understand that meeting never did take place. And he ended up seeing a lot of other officials. Of course, we have a looming trade war between the European Union and China. I believe the tariffs are 38% tariffs that the EU is going to impose on EVs from China, electric vehicles. And Habic goes to Beijing and he wonders why things are so tense between Europe, Germany and China. And actually, Habic blamed Russia for it. That was who he put the blame on Russia. Not the fact that Europe is placing tariffs on Chinese goods. No, it's Russia's fault. Anyway, a disastrous trip. I think it was a politician who's a disastrous politician, actually. Anyway, what are your thoughts? I agree. I mean, the fact that members of the Green Party, including Analina Berbok, who is, let's remember, still Germany's foreign minister, have said unbelievably horrible things about China. You know, incredibly rude things about China. That supposedly doesn't play a role either in explaining why relations between China and Germany and Europe are now so bad. Now, you should pick a dictator. She's a big dictator, exactly. All of this. I mean, you know, she's his Green Party colleague friend, just saying something. This isn't something that Habic is apparently aware of. And of course, he comes along and he says, you know, I demand, I insist that China must stop all supplies of dual use goods to Russia and other Chinese, of course, which is simply not listening. Now, things to say about this. First of all, as I understand it, this is Robert Habic's first trip to China, since he became Vice Chancellor and Economics Minister. Now, I say that I'm not absolutely sure that is the case, but I believe it is the case. If so, that is extraordinary given that China is such an important trading partner for Germany. And the European Union has now imposed 38% tariffs on Chinese EV vehicles. Now, what is so interesting about this is that this has been done supposedly in order to protect Europe's own EV industries. It's, you know, the automobile industry and its development of EV cars, except that the core of Europe's automobile industry, which is the German car industry, has opposed these tariffs. And the reason they've opposed these tariffs is because the German car industry has been a major exporter of cars to China. The most, well, certainly, when you go to China, I mean, I was there some years ago, but I remember the cars that you saw, the foreign cars that you saw were predominantly German. So the Germans export cars to Germany. They've exported machine tools. They've exported all kinds of things. Germany absolutely does not need to be drawn into a tariff war between Germany and China. Germany has done very well from the trade with China. And if you're talking about German car makers, I suspect that their long-term plans was to work together with the Chinese on EV technology, very different from the perspectives of the US, for example. And it's a bit of a strange thing anyway, that we are arguing at this particular point in time about EVs, because as everybody who has been following the automobile news closely, as I do in Britain and in Europe, sales of EV cars anyway are falling. There's not a great demand in Europe for these things. Now, I don't want to get into the details as to why that is, but say it's suffice to say for the moment European consumers appear to be turning their backs on them. So it's a very strange thing to enter into a battle over. Now, the Chinese are retaliating. They've already started to take steps to impose tariffs on imports of pork. It doesn't sound like it's a big thing, but it's a $3 billion trade. It's going to affect severely Spanish farmers, where a lot of this pork comes from, apparently. More importantly, the Chinese are gradually shifting towards restrictions on imports and machine tools from Europe. Once upon a time, they needed to import machine tools from Europe. China now is the biggest machine tool maker in the world. It doesn't need that so much. And the Chinese are gradually also moving towards cutting back, curtailing their imports of aircraft from Airbus as China's own aerospace industry develops. Now, I don't think that had been the Chinese intention, because the Chinese have always wanted to maintain a close connection economically with Europe. They wanted to import goods from Europe and similarly to export goods from Europe, because they saw Europe's economy, especially Germany's economy, as complementary to themselves. But if there is a trade war, Europe will lose from it. China ultimately will gain from it. So why are the Europeans doing all of this? The answer is it's politics. They are under pressure from the United States to curtail their economic links with China, because the United States is in a geopolitical conflict with China. The United States is putting pressure on the Europeans, therefore, to reduce their commercial and economic ties with China. Ursula von der Leyen and all of the others, of course, follow that course. That's why we've had these tariffs on Chinese EV imports. The Chinese will retaliate. We will gradually shift to a trade war. German business is extremely unhappy. They finally persuaded Habek to go to China, to try to turn this round and to try to see if some kind of common ground can be achieved. The Chinese are absolutely furious. Neither Leyen, the prime minister, nor Xi Jinping, the president, seem to be interested in meeting Habek. Habek himself isn't really motivated to stop the trade war, because he basically agrees with the Americans about ending the relationship, the economic, commercial relationship with China. So he goes to China and he poses and postures and signals, virtue signals, about China's trade with Russia. So this is a sign. This visit, far from slowing the process of economic disengagement between China and Europe, is going to accelerate it. As I said, the Chinese are furious about the tariffs. They're furious about everything that's happening. Habek has gone on this visit to try to appease German business and perhaps also to turn things round electrally for the Green Party. But in the end, nothing is going to come from this visit, because Habek isn't really looking for solutions. He wants to intensify the conflict with China as well. Disengaging from China means disintegration for Germany. It's in Habek. This is the green agenda. I think for Habek, this fits perfectly well with the green agenda. The US policy for him is exactly as the Greens want Germany to become. This is why I stopped this trade war with China. That's probably how he sees it. Well, this is the point. I blame it all on Russia. I blame it all on Russia. The German people, they don't blame it. This is a thing that I think a lot of people just do not understand. If you're talking about the Greens in Germany, not all of them, but a good part of them and certainly their leadership. Deindustrialization is not something they oppose. They want it to happen, because of course it's consistent with their overriding philosophy and ideology. They want deindustrialization. It's all very well for German industry to be unhappy with the direction that things are taking, and of course German voters are becoming increasingly unhappy as well. But Habek and Bebok and those sorts of people have completely different priorities. Now they have the perfect excuse to blame it on Russia, so that the people aren't even going to be angry with them. Not only is Germany deindustrializing, not only have they been cut off from Russia, not only are they about to be cut off from China, but when things go really bad for the German people, blame it on Putin, don't you blame it on us? It works well for Habek and for Bebok, at least so they think. I think people in increasing numbers of people in Germany as the European Parliament election showed are starting to get wise to this. It's taken a while to happen, but I think it is beginning to happen. But having said that, I think that's the plan going forward and the connection with China. They are very, very committed, now fully committed to being with the United States, with the Biden administration perhaps to be more precise, than with the United States. They're all in with that. China, of course, as far as they're concerned, is the dictatorship. They probably want to see the economic relationship with China, built up by German industry over decades of hard work. They're probably quite happy to see it all fall apart. Just of course, they were very, very happy to turn off the whole economic relationship with Russia, also built up by German industry over decades of hard work. It's extraordinary how fast this is happening and the Chinese, of course, have seen right through it. They know exactly why Habek is in China, that he's not really there to change anything or to adjust everything and that's why important people are not meeting him. Yeah, well, what you said about the people rising up to what Habek and Analina are doing, the German citizens understand that they're destroying Germany. Analina, she said about a year and a half ago, what do we care what the citizens want? We'll do whatever we want. She said something like that. I remember her at some event saying we don't care what the citizens want. We're going to do what we want. She was talking about Ukraine, giving money to Ukraine and weapons to Ukraine, but I'm sure that carries over to China as well. Oh, I've known Germany or suffering. I've known Germany or suffering or losing jobs or whatever, we're going to do what we want. Exactly. I've known about that at all. I'm sure that's wrong. That's exactly what they envisage. That's exactly what they want to say. Absolutely, they're not interested in the vast majority of people in Germany, who it's important to remember have never voted for them. I think the greens, the maximum they've ever got, which is in the last parliamentary election, was around 20%. More often, they tumble around 11% to 15%. That's basically where they are now. They're back to their core electorate, which is still there, and probably will always be there for them. If they achieve their greater strategic objectives, we're worried. All right. We'll leave it there. 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