Steve Hsu: Mearsheimer, if you notice his ability to get an editorial placed in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, or similar high prestige publication went to roughly zero for about a decade. Okay? But he's back in the limelight now. What is most interesting about that book, which was controversial at the time, is that Trump himself in a tweet recently mentioned. In answer to your question, Alf. Trump tweeted something like the following he said 20 years ago, which is really referencing the more or less the period that Mearsheimer and Walt were writing about. Trump said something like 20 years ago, you couldn't say a single bad word about Israel as a politician in America. So Trump literally acknowledged that the level of control or the level influence that the Israel lobby had in the United States was if anything, by Trump's description, greater than what Mearsheimer and Walt were willing to say in their book.

Alf: Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of Seeking Truth From Facts. Today I'm once again pleased to be joined by Steve Hsu of the Manifold Podcast to discuss recent geopolitical developments. How's it going, Steve?

Steve Hsu: It's great. Glad to be with you, Alf.

Alf: Great to hear. Thank you very much for being here. So to to begin with, of course we recently saw the Victory Day Parade in China, commemorating the 80th anniversary of victory over Japan in the Second World War. What do you think the spectacle of the parade signals about the direction in which the world order is moving?

Steve Hsu: Well, I think there were two important things. One was of course, the military hardware on display. And we, we could get into that, if you want, I could just summarize it by saying that the Chinese have largely caught up with the US and the West in almost all the major weapon systems. And probably can manufacture these things at larger scale and lower cost than the Americans. I think for people who are specialists in military technology, it's very impressive. I mean, the number of new systems that are on display, you know, is, is, is just incredible. So I think that was very you know, very good use of symbolism on their part, signaling that they've arrived and they they can't really be intimidated by the Americans.

The other aspect was of course, the people that were in attendance. And so you had Putin there and Kim Jong-Un and, Modi had just been there for the SCO, but wasn't at the actual parade.

Alf: Would you mind elaborating a bit more on the, hardware aspect of, of the display?

Steve Hsu: Yeah. There so many things that one could go over. One of the things that really struck my eye was the YG 19, which is this air breathing scramjet hypersonic missile. So it's a missile that uses a certain type of propulsion which only kicks in when it's moving at well above supersonic velocities. And it allows this thing to maneuver, throughout its entire flight and, and to accelerate as well. So, so the other types of hypersonic weapons are typically a ballistic missile which, you know, after it reaches its highest point is, is sort of falling through the atmosphere or possibly gliding through the atmosphere, but isn't, doesn't have active power, doesn't have active thrust.

Whereas the scramjet thing you know, which I think reportedly could have a range of something like 5,000 kilometers or more. That thing can is, is underpowered flight all the way into the end. And so that was a new technology. The Russians have a similar scramjet missile and basically nobody else in the world, I think, other than the Russians and the Chinese right now have, this kind of technology.

So that, that really caught my eye as a qualitatively new kind of missile that the Chinese hadn't shown before. I think one thing that caught, many people's attention was the, very wide variety of drones. So these are drones, large drones, which are the size of jet fighters and probably will be used as kind of loyal wing men.

So that either using say a fifth generation two seater J 20 or maybe a sixth generation fighter, the Chinese, would be able to have one human pilot and maybe with a copilot controlling some large number of drones, which are in effect just, flying missile launching platforms. And radarsensors that accompany an occupied human fighter jet.

And, you know, it's a direction that I think a lot of militaries are headed, but the Chinese seem to be, you know, possibly ahead of the Americans on this kind of thing or at least at parody. You know the, the range of things that they displayed was just incredible. I, I guess another one I should comment on is an unmanned submarine, two varieties of unmanned submarine. And what's interesting there is that a lot of the difficult engineering in submarines is needed to keep the humans alive inside them. And if you have one which is completely automated with no humans inside, that thing can probably operate at a much higher depth than a regular submarine.

It's potentially much quieter than a regular submarine, and something like that could be quite a threat. I think it's difficult to communicate with submarines when they're submerged. One would have to speculate as to how they're going to communicate with this thing.

It, it'll have some limited, you know, intelligence so that, you know, it maybe can be programmed to like detect an enemy submarine and then pursue it, launch a torpedo at it, et cetera, or surface and receive communications. But people have speculated on all kinds of things. Like this thing could just sort of sit at the bottom of the ocean.

And wait until it detects an enemy sub passing above it, and then sort of track that enemy sub and maybe attack it. Another possibility which is inspired by the drones they're using in Ukraine is that it could be that this thing trails, some fiber optic cable behind it, and maybe that is used to control the submarine just as, they control these drones, over many, many kilometers on the Ukrainian front through this, you know, very, very thin fiber optical cable that it trails. Another possibility could be that the unmanned sub has a fiber optic cable, which it trails. And that fiber optic cable is connected to a little pod, and maybe that pod actually floats near the surface of the water or at the surface of the water, but maybe 10 kilometers from where the sub actually is and that pod is used for communication. So there's all kinds of interesting technologies here. And for a lot of them, we really don't know not what their capabilities are, but also like how they would affect the battlefield of the future.

Alf: Hmm. Truly fascinating developments. And they, they reminded me of an issue that I'm aware has been facing the US defense tech industry, which is, that there have been reports that a lot of the technical knowhow, that was once present within that industry has been slipping away gradually in some areas.

So on that basis, do you think it, it's likely that if the Chinese have indeed overtaken, or at least with a parity with the US on, on these, technologies. Do you think it's likely that that gap will continue to grow in, in China's favor?

Steve Hsu: You know, I think this is a controversial point, but I would have to say, I, I agree with what you just said. And so my caricature of the history of military competition between the United States and China goes something like this. If you go back 20 or 30 years, the Chinese were way behind the US was the hegemon, and had just come out of a very intense cold war with the Soviets. And during that period, a lot of the best and brightest from the US scientific and technical pool of human capital went into defense.

So when I was a student. If you didn't make it as a academic physicist, your number two option would be to go into the defense industry. And in fact my first job offer that I had in, when I was in college was to work at the Institute for Defense Analysis on X-ray lasers, which was a technology that was meant to be quite useful in Star Wars to shoot down enemy ICBMs in space.

The top group of people trained in physics would tend to stay in academia and do sort of frontier, frontier, pure science research. But then the number two group would all go into defense. So you had an incredibly talented group of people doing stuff and, and there were lots, there were lots of instances of famous, I mean, Nobel Prize caliber physicists.

Doing their academic work, but then also on the side doing some defense work. Uh, that was true both for the Soviets, and for the United States. Now, flash forward in the, the, the period post Cold War where the US was a sort of undisputed hegemon. The economy got heavily financialized. And then if you ask, what did people leaving academia from top math and physics and computer science departments, where did they go?

Well, they actually went to Wall Street. They no longer went into def the defense industry. So, from the time that I finished, say, let's just say graduate school, until now, during that period, very, very few of the academic elite. The most talented brains that we have in the United States went into defense.

In fact, in some very hard areas of say, engineering, like really hardcore signals processing or material science or high power engineering, very few Americans wanted to go into those areas because those areas are difficult. And there's quite a lot of study required to get to the frontier, and you could make a lot more money doing other things.

So during that period of time, the sort of glamorous areas, those were not glamorous areas at all. And, and most of the students who got PhDs in those areas in the last say 30 years were foreign. And a very big chunk of those foreign students were from China. So we have a very different situation where in China they still manage to you know, entice a pretty good chunk of their best people to go into defense related research.

And so consequently, it's not surprising to me that now that they've sort of caught up their first derivative is actually way higher than the US first derivative to take a very specific case in point. US never really put a lot of emphasis into hypersonic missiles. The Russians and the Chinese actually devoted a lot more of their effort into missile technology.

Recently the US sort of figured out, oh wait, we have a little problem here because the Chinese have these hypersonic missiles that can hit our ships surface ships like aircraft carriers. And gee, maybe we would like to have hypersonic missiles too. And so in the last decade or so, the US has launched diff different parts of the armed forces have launched multiple programs to build a US hypersonic missile capability, but most of those programs have actually failed.

So if if you track all of the hypersonic missile R and D programs sponsored by Air Force or Navy, or Army. most of those programs if by my count, have actually failed and been closed. And so the US hasn't caught up in this particular narrow area, China seems to be clearly ahead. And currently the US lags significantly in deployment and development of hypersonic missiles.

Yeah, I think what you said, is, is the case not only have the Chinese kind of caught up in absolute terms. I mean there could be areas where the US is still somewhat ahead. There could be some areas where the Chinese are ahead, but roughly they're sort of at parity. But the first derivative for the Chinese seems to be much higher.

Alf: An interesting development that is kind of counterintuitive to what a lot of people might think to be the case. And I mean, following on from this, but in a, in a similar vein, uh, there was of course the Shanghai Corporation Organization Summit in Tianjin recently at which Putin, Xi and Modi were seeing embracing one another.

What was your reaction to the summit and do you think anything concrete will come of it?

Steve Hsu: Well, it's hard to say whether Very hard, you know, hardcore security arrangements are gonna result from SCO the way that say, NATO has Article five, you know, things like mutual self-defense trees. I think those things will tend to be more sort of on a bilateral basis say China and Russia having some kind of self mutual self-defense relationship or the Chinese and the North Koreans.

So, so it's not clear at all that something, that tangible will result from SCO, but on the other hand, the, the symbolism was quite strong. So you, you had, you know, Modi there. I tweeted out a, a photo of Modi with Putin and um, XI was actually an old photo from an earlier. I think an earlier Shanghai SCO meeting from several years ago, I think maybe 2017, and this photo, but I selected it because the three leaders, the body language, looked very unified. They were striding out of a sort of very big, beautiful room with high ceilings and a, an ornate wooden door.

The photo, the way it was lit and the body language of the leaders just appealed to me. It seemed like, it seemed very symbolic of them all being sort of unified together even though it was an old photo and I tweeted it out, it sort of went viral. And then amusingly the Trump account seems to have tweeted the exact same photo, the one that I cropped from the original.

Trump tweeted it out saying something like, oh, we seem to have lost Russian India to deepest, darkest China. I think he was kind of joking, but he wasn't completely joking, but he, he tweeted out that same image, which I, I thought was kind of funny. I think that the SCO happening just on the heels of Trump really going after almost every other country in the world with his tariffcampaign.

And with India having been, you know, unsuccessfully you know, tariffed in order to get them to stop, buying Russian oil, I, I think there was this sort of confluence events that made of events that really made this specific last SCO meeting very, very symbolic. And who knows what was said between those leaders in the different bilaterals?

I tweeted out another photograph from that meeting in which the Iranian president Pezeshkian who attended the SCO meeting in Tianjin he was taking a high speed train from Tianjin to Beijing. And someone from his entourage had I guess released on social media photo of him sitting in this, you know, like a first class business class, you know, a really nice plush seat on a Chinese high-speed train, looking out the window very thoughtfully.

And outside the window were these huge skyscrapers. And you could imagine Pezeshkian thinking as he is riding from Tianjin to Beijing. Something like, well, you know, these Europeans and Americans are sanctioning us over our nuclear program just as they sanctioned the Russians after the Russians invaded Ukraine in 2022.

But here in China, I can see firsthand almost everything that I could ever want to buy. Whether it's advanced cars airplanes, trains, solar panels, computers, chips, et cetera. Almost anything that I might wanna buy, I could buy here, and those sanctions won't affect me. And so in a way I, I think that's sort of emblematic of the way the other leaders at SCO may have been thinking that they have a potential partner now in China that can supply all the advanced technologies and manufactured goods, that in the past they had to rely on Western trade to access. And, and so we're really talking about the dawn of a new era here potentially. So just to give a broader overview of events, at SCO I think there's really been a kind of inflection point in the perceptions of those leaders. So imagine those leaders that are attending the SCO meeting. They have access to Putin and his team. They have access to Xi and his team. They have access to Modi and his team, and they can have very intense one-on-one dialogues to exchange information in this format. But they can all look at recent events, which signal a decline in US hegemonic power. So the US put its harshest sanctions on Russia after the Ukraine war started, they were unable to collapse the Russian economy. The Russians were able to.

Get all the manufactured goods they needed from China, drone supply chain. They were able to sell raw materials to China in order to pay for those manufactured goods. The manufactured goods they got from China were, you know, if not entirely on par with goods they could get from the west, certainly comparable.

So that, that was a, a new era signaling, a new era. The Houthis in Yemen managed to close down shipping in the Red Sea for what is now about two years. Even though two different American presidents, Biden and Trump launched formal phone ops, freedom of navigation operations involving something like 10% of all the ships in the US Navy.

Expending billions of dollars in operations costs and also in anti-missile interceptors used to keep the US fleet safe in the Red Sea, but failed to reopen shipping. So if you look at the amount of traffic going through the Red Sea, it's still way, way, way below, what it was two years ago before the Houthis launched their action against Israel. So that was an example where the US military, the strongest Navy in the world, stated very explicitly a concrete goal. They said, we will do X, we will restore shipping in the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal. They were opposed by a small, impoverished nation that didn't even have access to Russian and Chinese military equipment. They only had access to what is really secondhand Iranian drones and missiles, and yet the US was an unable to defeat them, unable to do X. The US said we will do X. Two years later, they turns out they could not do X. So I think for the individual leaders at the SCO and their teams, I think there's got to be an awareness that this is a different era and the limits to US power are much more apparent than they were just a few years ago.

So I, I think that's really not necessarily the specific venue of the SCO, but the timing of it taking place just after all these different limitations on American power became clear. And I guess the, the third one I should add to that is they were unable to stop the Indians from buying Russian oil.

Alf: Well, I think particularly notable, I mean, and you touched on this, but particularly notable, I think was the presence of Modi. At the summit and as, as has been the kind of general warming of relations between India and China that's been seen this year so far with diplomatic travel and business links, which were severed after border clashes in 2020, being reopened for the first time in over five years.

Do you think that this is the beginning of a longer term Sino Indian tion model?

Steve Hsu: You know, it's, it's really hard to say because on the one hand I've always thought that that border dispute was a dispute over territory that neither side has really any practical use for. So neither side is really going to develop that territory.

It's not heavily populated, it's not particularly valuable. In terms of mineral resources.

Alf: Was is Arunachal Pradesh or I think is the that, was that the territory or? I think there are I think there are two. And then I think there's in the, near, near Kashmir, I think.

Steve Hsu: Exactly. So I think there are two separate areas that are whose borders are in dispute.

In neither case if you actually go up to the border where it's actually disputed. And there's something else called the line of actual control, which is where, where the actual militaries are, are, are positioned but each side claims that the border should be somewhere else. You know, neither side is doing anything particularly great with that territory. In fact, I, I've seen some documentaries about. Some small villages on the Chinese side of these borders where the government has sort of paid a lot of money just to develop those villages, just for kind of symbolic reasons. If the border were not in dispute, if there were no geopolitical reason to develop that area, they, they wouldn't necessarily have to sink those resources there.

So on practical grounds, I think neither party would lose that much if for some reason, like an act of God, like shifted the border somewhere against their preferences, it wouldn't really damage the interest of either country that much. It's more a symbolic thing like, like the leader can't be seen to give in to this other country on the border issue.

Right? So on the one hand, the symbolic importance of this and the emotional content, you know, suggests that it won't be easy for them to solve the border dispute. On the other hand, there's no really deep fundamental reason that they can't settle it. And so, you know, I think if, if, larger issues loom like the US is really pressuring India, and India wants to show more independence. You know, maybe in, in my dreams, you know, there could be some three-way diplomatic initiative involving Pakistan, India, and China that just settles things in some way preventing, you know, these, these border clashes or, or larger conflicts between Pakistan and India.

Alf: So from a realist perspective you don't see any reason why India and China couldn't have a, a, a better relationship and that there's no real conflict of interest aside from this, obviously.

Yeah. Symbolic and emotive border dispute.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, I mean there's a long history here. There's a long path dependence, right? Which, which makes it hard for things to be settled. On the other hand, it's not like, if you ranked the most important in terms of like real practical military terms, you know, things that Chinese need to accomplish, moving that border slightly with India isn't really very important to them.

And the same thing for India. As I said, if by some act of God, the, the border thing were resolved neither party would really face any kind of serious existential risk or military risk. So, so in that sense, it, it could be settled but I'm not saying it will be settled. But now if the US is pressing India too much and India needs to show to the US that it can turn to China if it needs to, then I think they can easily at least cool off the border situation. So even if they don't, if they don't settle it in a permanent sense, they can just say, Hey, let's agree to make sure nothing is happening at this border. stabilize it. Let's, let's all just agree to calm things down or in this, in that part of each of our countries so that we can negotiate some huge infrastructure investment between us or trade in some specific resources, et cetera, et cetera, just so the Americans know they can't push us around. And I think that's sort of the nature of what's being discussed between Modi and Xi.

Alf: I mean, on that obviously the, in recent, recent months, Trump has imposed one of his highest tariff rates on India. In response to them, but refusing to cease buying Russian, Russian weaponry according to, according to the White House. and you've also had the, the conflict between Pakistan, India earlier in the year where Trump seemingly endorsed Pakistan's versions of events regarding the White House's role in in negotiations. And this has prompted, what some have seen as a sort of strategic realignment in between with regards to the two major South Asian countries, not only with relations between Beijing and New Delhi becoming warmer, but also between Washington and Islamabad. I mean, do you think that this realignment is going on?

And if so, do you think that given Pakistan's relatively weaker geostrategic position relative to India, do you think this could be a mistake on the Trump administration's part?

Steve Hsu: Well, I do think it was a mistake on the Trump administration's part to push India so hard. I think there's just been this, this, what's the right way to say it? This overconfidence on the American side, first in the Biden administration and now in the Trump administration over the amount of power the Americans can really wield using sanctions and tariffs. Amusingly, it works well on our allies, so we're able to like, you know, suck blood out of our allies, but against countries that are determined to retain their sovereignty, I think we, we don't have a particularly good record with this, that the sanctions didn't crush the Russian economy after the invasion of Ukraine.

We can't stop the Indians from buying both oil and military equipment from the Russians. So it, it's just been, I think, an exercise in futility. In terms of Pakistan it's very hard to know exactly what's gonna happen in Pakistan. Yes, Pakistan might. Be convinced to align a little bit more closely with the Americans.

But on the other hand, you know, the, I think the Pakistanis were very, very happy with the performance of the Chinese equipment that they got and used against India in, in this short conflict to the point where I, I think they realized their, the future of their military is actually tighter integration with the Chinese side.

Alf: I know India for a long time was seen as I mean, going back to the piv, Pivot to Asia Days under Obama, India was seen as a crucial plank in the US strategy to contain China, which it seems according to some reports that the State Department has all been abandoned.

Steve Hsu: Yeah. I think if you were a part of the normie establishment in the United States, you would say this is a huge mistake by the Trump people, right? You would say something like, oh, we have this perfectly functional AUKUS kind of quad strategy going where, you know, we were enlisting, you know, everyone, we could, all the quote democracies right in the Asia Pacific area or Indo-Pacific, to you know, as much as possible join a kind of counterbalancing alliance, against China and India, as you point out, is the, at least in terms of population and total size of their PPP economy, by far the biggest component of that, alliance. And so you know, for the, the Trump people to mess that up. I think for the established sort of normy establishment, geo strategists in the US they would say that's just a disaster that Trump people should not have done that.

Now I personally would say this is, this is part of the negative, blow back from the proxy war that we started in Ukraine against Russia. So rather than destabilizing Russia and getting rid of Putin, which is what we hoped to do, or actually thought, you know, many of the normie establishment.

Strategists thought would happen, you know, because of our sanctions in 2022. Instead of that, it's pushed Russia and China closer together. And now it seems to have actually pushed India and China together because, we, thought we could force the Indians to stop buying Russian oil and Russian weapons, but in fact, we can't.

There, there's a rumor that I don't know if these meetings have happened, but they're definitely scheduled direct talks between Hegseth and his counterpart in China. and also between Rubio and his counterpart. Oh, wow. And, and the rumor about this is that, that the Hegseth is, wants to basically say to the Chinese, look we do not want a war in the Pacific. We're not all about a war in the Pacific. We're actually gonna focus more on the Americas and stuff like this. That's the rumor that's around. I, I don't know like if these meetings have happened, but I think the meetings are definitely scheduled. I don't know if they've actually happened yet, but people are talking about this. I mean, that could be the, this administration's policy that they don't want to really pick a fight with China right now. But they do want to, I mean, Venezuela is a big problem for them because that oil used to all be refined by, US refineries and before, I guess. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. It's a huge, and so if like the Chinese are building refining infrastructure for the Venezuelans in Venezuela, it's like very big problem for big oil in the United States.

And so the US might be brokering a deal where like, you guys let us have our way in Venezuela and we will let you, and we'll just leave you alone in Asia. Yeah. Yeah.For me , as we were entering the era of Trump 2.0, I always thought there is a chance that this modus vivendi between Beijing and Washington could be established under Trump 2.0.

Alf: I mean one appointment in, in that regard that was quite heartening for me. And Darren Beattie in the State Department has been on record saying that you know, he, he wants a peaceful coexistence.

Yeah. He actually said, I think he used the phrase, Trump peaceful rise.

Steve Hsu: Yeah.

To refer to China's china's rise on world stages the past 20 years.

No, I have to say that even though I think there's a chance that because Trump is a businessman and I do really honestly believe he hates war or thinks war is just wasteful. I, I think there is a chance for this kind of grand bargain under Trump, his team or at least chunks of his team are among the most, like rabidly anti-China

Alf: Rubio. Right?

Steve Hsu: Well, well, Rubio, even Rubio said a bunch of things about Multipolarity when he came in, which were kind of amazing, right. But, but may and I'm thinking maybe lower level people, like definitely Navarro, for example. Yeah. But they're definitely China.

Yeah. But definitely if you just like took the like top hundred people in the Trump administration in terms of power and you just got them to say what they really thought about China, I think you could find people there that would say things that are as anti-China as ever uttered, you know, by US officials.

So, so I think that's all true, but I, I think like the guy at the top though is willing to cut a deal.

Alf: Moving to that issue of the, of the proxy war in Ukraine. Last month, we obviously saw the Alaska Summit between Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin. What has been said that many key points were agreed by both parties. It didn't result in any conclusive agreement, nor was it initially expected to.

About a month on, what do you think is the significance of the Alaska Summit in hindsight, and do you have any sense of the likelihood or lack thereof of a peace agreement to end the war in Ukraine in short to medium term?

Steve Hsu: Well, just to first take a step back and frame it. So my view, having been someone who was following events in Ukraine. Since before the Maidan protest in 2014, which overthrew a government which was friendly to Moscow my view is that the US has been trying to use Ukraine as a a at minimum, a, a means to sort of. As the British would say, wrong foot, the Russians at a more maximalist level to really weaken the Russians by trying to create a, a hostile fairly large and significant country right on their doorstep which might be even part of NATO

Alf: there's some I know there's some evidence if, if, if you go back a little, a few, a few years back before the, before the Maidan in Ukraine. If you look, I know if you look into the rise in the support that the US gave to Mikheil Saakashvili, in Georgia, there, there's some evidence that the US was trying that in Georgia as well.

Steve Hsu: Yeah, so this is getting into ancient history, but you know, maybe, maybe for our audience it's okay. So I also also watched, there was a brief conflict between Georgia and Russia a few years before Maidan, which is I think what you're referring to and, and it was almost a micro version of what happened in Ukraine where a government, which was friendly to the west, was put in power in Georgia, and they were sort of encouraged. They were sort of given the green light that they could act aggressively toward the Russians. I mean, there was a, again,\ a disputed border there, right? So they were given sort of a signal. This is my reading of events, which I watched in real time.

Now it's all lost in the midst of history, and it's been covered up. I mean, there's been so much propaganda about the Georgia thing, just as, just as with the Ukraine thing. The conventional establishment story is that the Russians attacked the Georgians, right, but in real time as someone who actually, you know, was a conscious adult following world events while this happened, it looked more like the US encouraged the Georgians to take some aggressive steps in that disputed border region. That caused an immediate reaction from the Russian military, which crushed the Georgians. And then the whole thing ended at that point. And many people on the Russian side who are critical of Putin say that had he acted that, acted that decisively in 2014, roughly say 20 14, 20 15, 20 16, with regards to Ukraine, he could have nipped this whole thing in the bud and there wouldn't have been this whole,

Alf: I know that's, I'm pretty sure that's Alexander Dugin's argument if I'm.

Yeah, absolutely.

Steve Hsu: So, but I think like, again, like a lot of like quote serious Russians who are a little more to the right of Putin, or not even to the right, but just the inter, the way they interpret an A counterfactual history, right? They would just say like, look, if Putin had not been so pro moderate and pro west, which I think he was during this period, he tried everything he could to settle this matter in a peaceful way, even accepting the Minsk accords and things like this. So I think one reading of Putin from the Russian side is he tried for too long to be moderate and, and pro western. That's why now we're fighting a full scale, essentially kind of a full scale war in Ukraine because he let it go too long and now, now we're where we are. Both the reading of Georgia that you and I just discussed and the reading of say, my Don, and what happened in the years leading up to 2022. Both of those interpretations if you discuss those in the west, you'll be called a Putin puppet, a Russia shill or whatever.

Yeah. Oh yeah. But it, it's insane because if you really followed events in real time, I, I swear to you, I'm, I'm only telling you like what was reported at the time, like, about what was happening in Georgia or what was happening in Ukraine. It's all been memory holded. So all of this is just shocking.

And then what's amazing is that now you have people like Vance and Trump and their teams coming into office and, and they clearly believe the version of events that, that I'm elucidating, right? So literally the president of the United States and his team. Interpret events more along the lines of the way that I interpret this event the event.

So, so Trump said many times this war should have never happened. If I had been president, never would've happened. You know, the establishment still can't come to grips with that. So, so like the, the, the sort of deep state establishment normie, historians and legacy media and think tanks, they, they refuse to acknowledge that the, current US White House actually endorses the interpretation of recent history that I just summarized.

Right? So anyway, there's this, there's this crazy incoherence in American thinking or western thinking on this matter. This should be a lesson to anyone who. Wants to understand history is that when things are heavily politicized and you have intelligence agencies involved and intelligence agencies, controlling how legacy media operates, et cetera. So it's very hard. It's very easy to fool the general population. It's very hard for people to understand what really happened.

Alf: What would you say the implications of the the summit itself are?

Steve Hsu: I'm sorry I didn't answer your question. Yeah, no worries, no worries.

Yeah, so I think that although I agree with the interpretation of history that Vance and Trump and their teams you know, were they, were they to articulate it fully usually they don't articulate it fully.

You just get hints of what their beliefs are. You know, when they're, they're sort of discussing, you know, what's happening now, but, but when they're discussing what's happening now you can get a sense of what they think happened, say in the last 10 years there. Right. And on that I think they're closer to reality than the Biden people were.

But I think the Trump people were overconfident in how much leverage they had over Putin, how easy it would be to resolve events. I think they underestimated the general loss of trust that the Russians now have for any Western promises or guarantees. And so. I think Trump thought he could settle this much more easily than actually he can.

I think Putin is more or less committed that this thing is gonna have to be settled on the battlefield, and I think they think in the next year or two they're just gonna exhaust the Ukrainian military and dictate terms for how this whole thing is settled. I just don't think that there's anything, whether they meet face to face in Alaska or they meet face to face in Moscow or Washington, I just don't think there's anything Trump can do to get Putin to call a ceasefire.

From the Russian's perspective, a ceasefire is just a, giving the Ukrainian side breathing room to rebuild itself with Western assistance, and then they have to, the Russians have to basically a trip them down again to the point where they, they can no longer fight. I think a lot of people in the West misunderstand the war, the war goals of the Russians. The Russians don't have as their main war goal accumulating territory.

I think their goal is literally just to beat down and destroy the Ukrainian ability to make war. And they're perfectly happy to sit where they are and be attacked by Ukrainians and just slowly degrade the Ukrainian capabilities. Eventually the Ukrainian military will collapse and then they can dictate their terms.

Alf: Another issue which you've commented on in relation to geo strategy is the dramatic increase in negative sentiment towards Israel throughout the west. Particularly the steep decline in what had hit to been pretty broad support for Israel in the United States. Crucially, this drop in support has been seen both on the left and the right, especially amongst younger demographics. What do you think the long term consequences of this shift in opinion, if any, will be?

Steve Hsu: So I don't have the statistics right in front of me, but roughly speaking in the Democrat Party, the level of support for Israel has dropped significantly over what's happening in Gaza. And as you said, among Republicans, younger Republicans also have a more and more unfavorable feeling about Israel in particular the Netanyahu government and what it's doing in Gaza. It's really only a sort of boomer Republicans, older Republicans, that still show strong support for Israel. And I think this is quite alarming to the Israelis and to American Jews who are supporters of Israel.

I think the CEO of the ADL actually has, has voiced these concerns publicly on several occasions. So I think the Israelis and American Jews who are pro-Israel are all concerned about the what, how us public opinion is evolving toward Israel. And I think in the long run it's gonna be a real problem for them because I think the, the, the current generation of young people are eventually gonna dominate US politics. I don't think Israel can really count on the same level of support from the United States. Certainly for what are pretty aggressive actions against the Palestinians in Gaza. So I think it's a long-term problem for Israel. I think Israel, you know, although one could argue that what happened after October 7th was a sort of a set of victories for them because they, they did crush Hamas. They neutered, Hezbollah fell obviously. Yes. Side fell. So, so there, there were lots of tactical victories for them, but in the long run they really can't survive without US support and they may over time lose that support. So I think on sort of as a geostrategist, I think like projecting forward 20 years for Israel, I, I'm not very optimistic.

I think there there are future, outcome future histories or future states of the world in which Israel really has a significant existential crisis, sometimes in sometime in the next 20 years. I'm not saying that will definitely happen, but there's a significant chunk of probability where that happens.

I think.

Alf: That's an interesting, interesting point. What would your idea be on, you know, some people argue that the, it's only really the opinions of the elites that matter. I mean, that's research on this why opinions of the elites matter a lot more for public policy than popular opinion.

So, I mean, do you think that that could potentially put a span in the works for the idea that this could have?

Steve Hsu: So let me frame this somewhat historically. So my friend, John Mearsheimer and his collaborator,Walt Stephen Walt at Harvard, wrote a book in the nineties called The Israel Lobby.

And this book was very dry academic. You know, not at all an emotionally charged book. They, they tried to make, they did it. I know. It attracted

Alf: A hell of a lot of controversy. Well,

Steve Hsu: They took a ton of blowback over this. I know this from talking to John, actually about it. So but the book itself is very dry and analytical and it just tries to make the point that there are many, you know, there's a very powerful group of Americans who support Israel, predominantly Jewish Americans, but also you know, their evangelicals and other people. That wasn't such a big deal in the nineties, but they just sort of analyzed the level of lobbying power. In support of Israel that existed and how it tended to influence American foreign policy decisions in the Middle East. And, and you know, I think, again, like if you, if you look back at that book now, you realize they were very measured.

It was not an anti-Semitic book. It was not an anti-Israel book. It was an analytical book by two of America's most prominent political scientists. They took a ton of blowback. Over this Mearsheimer, if you notice his ability to get an editorial placed in the Wall Street Journal or New York Times, or similar high prestige publication went to roughly zero for about a decade. Okay? But he's back in the limelight now. What is most interesting about that book, which was controversial at the time, is that Trump himself in a tweet recently mentioned. In answer to your question, Alf Trump tweeted something like the following he said 20 years ago, which is really referencing the more or less the period that Mearsheimer and Walt were writing about. Trump said something like 20 years ago, you couldn't say a single bad word about Israel as a politician in America. So, Trump literally acknowledged that the level of control or the level influence that the Israel lobby had in the United States was, if anything, by Trump's description, greater than what Mearsheimer and Walt were willing to say in their book.

But Trump just flat out said it on social media and then he said, but what's happening in Gaza is really eroding support for them. It's a big loser in terms of PR for them. So Trump, you know, he often say what you want about the guy he often just blurts out the truth. Okay. And the truth here was a, there was an incredibly strong, and maybe is still an incredibly strong Israel lobby influencing American foreign policy in the Middle East, number one and number two it's in danger of losing its grip on American politics largely because of events in Gaza.

So, so that's my answer to your question, ALF's, like, Trump answered your question and I agree with his answer.

Alf: That's fa that's fascinating. And I think I think yeah, that's definitely a little truth to that Moving on to a, a wider debate around the nature of the world order that we're moving into. And especially so there's been considerable debate especially in light of a wide array of the geopolitical events, which I've discussed on the show with you and with other guests as well. Regarding the characterization of the era into which we have entered. There seems to be broad though not universal agreement that we have left the unipolar moment that emerged after the end of the Cold War, but there exists considerable disagreement as to whether we're entering a bipolar moment with Washington and Beijing as the two polls or a truly multipolar moment. What's your assessment of this debate?

Steve Hsu: Again, these are, these are sort of words, right? Words are a bit slippery. Like you know, what do you mean by bipolar? What do you mean by multipolar? The way I would put it is that there are two superpowers in the world now, the US and China. But the existence of these two superpowers opens the door for more freedom, strategic autonomy and freedom for smaller countries in the world.

So I, I don't think that. The Chinese are gonna impose a very strict order on the countries aligned with them. I think they tend to have a more, I hate to say less say fair, but, but they, they have a, a, a philosophy of non interference in, in the activities of, of other countries. On the other hand, the US I think the most cynical view of what's gonna happen with the US and we're starting to see this already with the Trump tariffs is the countries that are dominated by the US, the US will start literally sucking the blood out of these countries which it needs to fund its huge budget deficits and fiscal problems. And so the, it, it might be the US that is imposing very tight restraints on its allies, whereas the Chinese are gonna be part of a much looser not even coalition, but just group of countries that are not under the thumb of Washington but also are, I think, are not really under the thumb of Beijing.

Alf: On that note I think we're gonna round off today's episode, Seeking Truth and Facts. Thank you so much for coming on the show, Steve and I hope to have you on again in the not too distant future.

Steve Hsu: Always a pleasure, Alf.