Is China Poised to Take The Leadership Role On The World Stage From the US?
FAREED ZAKARIA, CNN HOST, FAREED ZAKARIA GPS: GPS, the Global Public Square. Welcome to all of you in the United States and around the world. I'm Fareed Zakaria. We'll begin today's show with a crazy week in world affairs. The White House accused Great Britain of spying on Trump Tower. Rex Tillerson said US policy towards North Korea has failed for 20 years. And Angela Merkel met with President Trump, a man who once accused her of ruining Germany. How did that go? Then, President Trump this week slashed budgets for agencies trying to tackle the global warming crisis. I'll ask President Obama's Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz, an MIT physicist, what he thinks of the energy challenges we now face. Also, Amal Clooney is taking on ISIS, trying to fight the terrorists the best way she knows how, not with a gun or a bomb, but with a legal brief.</s>AMAL CLOONEY, BARRISTER: This is global threat. It needs a global response. And part of that response must be a judicial one. It cannot only on the battlefield.</s>ZAKARIA: Clooney and her client join me to explain the horrors of ISIS' crimes and how justice can be served. Finally, 75 years of world history told through CIA maps, from the Eastern Front to Cuban missile, central Moscow to central Baghdad. But, first, here's my take. We do not yet have the official agenda for next month's meeting at Mar-A-Lago between Donald Trump and China's President Xi Jinping, but it might well be remembered as the beginning of a handover of power from the United States to China. After 75 years of American leadership on the world stage, Trump seems determined for America to retreat, opening a space that will eagerly be filled by the Communist Party of China. Trump railed against China on the campaign trail, bellowing that it was raping the United States. He vowed to label it a currency manipulator on his first day in office. But in his actual first interaction with Beijing, he caved. Weeks after his election, Trump had speculated that he might upgrade relations with Taiwan. In response, President Xi froze all contacts between Beijing and Washington on all issues, demanding that Trump reverse himself, which is exactly what happened. The Trump administration's vision for America's disengagement from the world is a godsend for China. Look at Trump's proposed budget, which would cut spending on American soft power, diplomacy and foreign aid, funds for international organizations by 28%. Beijing, by contrast, has quadrupled the budget of its foreign ministry in the last decade. Just tallying some of Beijing's key development and aid commitments, George Washington University's David Shambaugh estimates, that total adds up to $1.4 trillion compared to the Marshall Plan, which in today's dollars would cost about $100 billion. China's growing diplomatic strength matters. An Asian head of government recently explained to me that, at every regional conference, Washington sends a couple of diplomats whereas Beijing sends dozens. The Chinese are there at every committee meeting and you are not, he said. The result, he explained, is that Beijing is increasingly setting the Asian agenda. The Trump administration wants to skimp on US funding for the UN. This is music to China's ears. Beijing has been trying to gain influence in that global body for years. It has increased its funding for the UN across-the-board and would likely be delighted to pick up the slack as America withdraws. Of course, in return for this, China will gain increased influence from key appointments to major shifts in policy throughout the UN system. The first major act of the Trump administration was to withdraw the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a treaty that would have opened up long closed economies like Japan and Vietnam, but also would've created a block that could stand up to China's increasing domination of trade and economics in Asia. with Washington's withdrawal, even staunchly pro-American allies like Australia are now hedging their bets. Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has raised the possibility of China joining the TPP, essentially turning a group that was meant to be a deterrent against China into an arm of Chinese influence. One more gain for Beijing. The Trump administration does want a bigger military, but that has never been how China has sought to compete with US power. Chinese leaders have pointed out to me that this was the Soviet strategy during the Cold War, one that failed miserably. Their implication was let Washington waste resources on the Pentagon, Beijing would focus on economics, technology and soft power. Donald Trump's new National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster once remarked that trying to fight America symmetrically, tank for tank, was stupid. The smart strategy, he thought, would be an asymmetrical one. The Chinese seem to understand this. For more, go to CNN.com/Fareed and read my "Washington Post" column this week. And let's get started. The White House had quite a week on the world stage. So, let's get right to the discussion. Richard Haas is the President of the Council on Foreign Relations and the author of a World in Disarray: American Foreign Policy and the Crisis of the Old Order. And Antony Blinken was the Deputy Secretary of State under President Obama, now a CNN global affairs analyst. Richard, let me ask you. You've been in these kinds of meetings before. Angela Merkel and Donald Trump seem to have sort of kissed and made up. But Trump had mercilessly attacked her last year for her policy of letting refugees in. Do you think that the things are all better now or do those tensions linger?</s>RICHARD HAAS, PRESIDENT, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS: I wouldn't say the tensions have all gone away. They've clearly got a very different fundamental view of trade. Unless, I missed it, Fareed, the president didn't mention the words European Union in his remarks. It's, obviously, central to Germanys foreign policy. They didn't really talk about Russia, little bit about Ukraine. So, we don't know how much of a meeting of their minds there was and whether this president, for example, is going to go ahead and continue the strengthening of NATO. So, I actually think there's a lot of questions out there. The one thing I like was perhaps overlap - this issue of worker training, the German apprenticeship programs. This might be an interesting way to finesse not just the trade debate, but the larger debate about how do we make sure that workers can cope with the pressures of robotics and artificial intelligence and driverless vehicles. This is actually something Germany and the United States could take the lead on and perhaps this could be a centerpiece of the G20, which, as you know, the Germans host this year.</s>ZAKARIA: Tony, what did strike me about Donald Trump was that focus on worker training apprenticeship, but the odd thing, of course, is that Germany has all those programs and has maintained its manufacturing capacity not because it has practiced any kind of protectionism - in fact, it's very open to trade - but because it has very intrusive government policies, high tax, high regulation, what we would call socialized medicine in this country, which provides workers with a kind of base, an insurance that allows them to move forward.</s>ANTONY BLINKEN, CNN GLOBAL AFFAIRS ANALYST AND FORMER DEPUTY SECRETARY OF STATE UNDER PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes, Fareed. I think it's exactly right. But, look, if you put their personalities and profiles and policies into a computer, they would be about the last pair that matchmaker.com would spit out. They couldn't be more different. And Richard alluded to some of this. But when it comes to the most basic things, you now have Chancellor Merkel who seems to be the last champion of the liberal international order, the rule of law, transparency, the institutions that back it, the values that back it, and President Trump, unfortunately, who seems to be more in favor of something approximating a liberal democracy. So, this meeting was bound to try to put a positive gloss on things. But these are two very different people with two very different approaches.</s>ZAKARIA: Richard, when you think about where a meeting like this goes from here, shouldn't Rex Tillerson, the Secretary of State, have been there. I'm a little puzzled by the - just the sort of staffing of this kind of - these kind of - these things to ensure that there would then be follow-up and the policies that are talked about by the two heads of government actually happen.</s>HAAS: Someone said that about 80 percent to 90 percent of life is implementation. So, what happens after these meanings is often more important than what happens in it. And often, the sides turn out to actually agree on things they never quite manage to agree on during the meeting itself. I don't quite understand - I'll be honest, Fareed - why Rex Tillerson, the new Secretary of State, is traveling. It's very hard for him to represent administration policy towards Asia because there really isn't much in the way of policy towards Asia. There still isn't an inter-agency process. I would think he would be wiser to essentially stay home, focus on getting his building staffed up, which is essentially empty, protect the resources for the State Department, diplomacy, foreign aid in the budget, which have been decimated, and really develop his personal relationship with this president. At the end of the day, a Secretary of State is only as effective as his relationship with the president. And, clearly, here, I wouldn't say there's a divide so much as there just isn't that kind of closeness.</s>ZAKARIA: Tony, if he had to go somewhere, though, Asia was the right place and North Korea probably the right topic, right?</s>BLINKEN: Yes. I think that's exactly right. It is - if he's going to travel and not be at this meeting, this is the right place at the right time. And there is a looming crisis in Asia, represented by North Korea's relentless attempts to get a nuclear weapon that they can put on a missile capable of reaching the United States. Administrations, going back to the 1990s, have tried to curb their nuclear ambitions without success. But over the last year, this effort to get a missile that can hit us with a nuclear warhead has accelerated and they are getting closer to the day when that capability is put in the hands of a leader who acts, at the very least, impulsively and maybe even irrationally and is not bound by the rules of deterrence. So, the question is, what to do about it? And here, bringing the South Korean and Japanese allies together with China on some kind of united plan is exactly what needs to be done. Hopefully, that's what the secretary is working on.</s>ZAKARIA: I have to ask both of you finally. This crazy situation with the accusations from the White House toward the British government, the United States' closest ally since 1941, in which Sean Spicer said that essentially - or implied that British intelligence was spying on Trump Tower. The Brits then come forward and say this is nonsense. What they are referring to is nonsense are the words of the White House press secretary. Tony Blinken, can you ever remember anything like this happening?</s>BLINKEN: I can't. I think the word the Brits used was rubbish. But here's what I think happened, Fareed. Unfortunately, President Trump seems to have become the leading consumer and purveyor of fake news. And so, he reads this nonsense in Breitbart and other publications about the alleged wiretaps by President Obama and he reacts and puts it on his Twitter feed. And then, they find out, of course, that it's wrong, never happened. But they're incapable apparently of acknowledging a mistake, and so the typical modus operandi is to just double down. But having falsely accused the president to now rope in our closest ally and impugn it at the same time is really turning this into not just a domestic problem, but an international one. And ultimately, what's so troubling about this is that it undermines the credibility of the president and of the United States. Who is going to listen to him or believe him when he continues to put out these false allegations?</s>ZAKARIA: Richard, the part that strikes me as also being a kind of sad degradation is all these people from Sean Spicer to presumably McMaster - the national security advisor - Tillerson, they all have to in some way pretend that these are all serious allegations or accusations. Charles Krauthammer, the conservative commentator on Fox said, there isn't a person in Washington who believes that Obama wiretapped Trump. But they all have to pretend because the president said it that there's some credibility to this that perhaps some investigation will show something.</s>HAAS: Well, you're right, Fareed. It diminishes the president, it diminishes those around him. No good can come of it. As Tony correctly pointed out, it ends up devaluing the most important currency a president has, which is his word, which is his credibility. It also ends up hurting our relationships with some of our most important partners. We already had the rough conversation with Australia. We talked about Germany before. Now, the British. We've gotten off terribly with Mexico. And these are the relationships that in many ways are the foundation of what the United States does in the world. If we're not careful, we're going to turn America first into America only and we simply can't succeed in this kind of a global world without being able to leverage our relationships with our traditional friends.</s>ZAKARIA: And all the ones you mentioned, of course, are our closest allies. Richard Haas, Tony Blinken, pleasure to have you both on.</s>HAAS: Thanks, Fareed.</s>BLINKEN: Thank you, Fareed.</s>ZAKARIA: Next on GPS, snow or sleet, hot or cold, floods or droughts, scientists do agree human activity is changing the climate. But the Trump administration isn't so sure. I'll talk about the White House and climate change with Ernest Moniz, president Obama's energy secretary.