Chas Freeman analyzes Trump's Beijing visit against the backdrop of US setbacks in Iran
Glenn Diesen interviews former US Ambassador and Assistant Secretary of Defense Chas Freeman on May 12, 2026.
Summary
Glenn Diesen interviews Chas Freeman — former US Assistant Secretary of Defense, former Ambassador, and the interpreter for Richard Nixon's historic 1972 China visit — on the eve of Donald Trump's trip to Beijing to meet President Xi Jinping. Freeman argues that unlike Nixon's strategically transformative opening to China, Trump's visit is purely tactical, driven by ego and a lack of serious preparation, and that Trump arrives not as a victor but as a supplicant from a country exhausted by its failed campaign against Iran. Freeman describes the Iran war as the worst defeat in American history — a view he says Robert Kagan has also now reached — and outlines its lasting consequences: Iran's consolidation of control over the Strait of Hormuz, the likely development of Iranian nuclear weapons, the probable expulsion of US military forces from the Persian Gulf, and the acceleration of Gulf Arab realignment toward Russia and China. He also draws a direct connection between the erosion of international law abroad and the erosion of due process at home, arguing that the United States has abandoned the very rules-based order it built after World War II.
Key Takeaways
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Introduction and the Nixon Comparison
Glenn Diesen: Welcome back. Today is Tuesday, May 12th, 2026, and we have the great pleasure of being joined by Ambassador Chas Freeman, the former US Assistant Secretary of Defense. It's good to see you again, my friend.
Chas Freeman: Good to see you, Glenn.
Glenn Diesen: You are a Chinese speaker, and you were the interpreter for Richard Nixon when he visited China for the purpose of opening up relations. We now see that on Thursday it's Trump's turn to go to Beijing, where he will meet with Xi Jinping. How are you assessing this meeting — why is he going, what's on the agenda, and what can we expect?
Chas Freeman: It's not clear why he's going except for the gratification of his ego, which is not small and requires constant feeding. The Chinese are superb at pomp and circumstance for visitors, and he will have a chance to feel honored by the public events.
The circumstances of this visit — since you mentioned the Nixon visit in which I participated — are very different from that time. That visit was in the context of an apparent Soviet inclination to invade and conquer China, eliminate or subjugate it to the Soviet Union, and a common concern about Soviet expansionism. There was a concern on the part of the United States that the removal of China from the geopolitical chessboard would so much alter the geopolitical geometry to the detriment of the United States that we had to reach out to China. For their part, the Chinese felt threatened by the Soviet Union. They'd had skirmishes on their borders with the Soviets in both the Far East and in Central Asia, and they felt they needed protection.
Nixon created what I call the protected state. This is a term which applies also to World War II. The United States valued China's continued independence, sovereignty, and existence because of the fact that it tied down an enormous part of the Japanese army. We didn't really expect Chiang Kai-shek to be able to do anything terribly positive, but his primarily surviving served our geopolitical interests. Nixon applied that same concept of a protected state to China in the 1970s.
That was a meeting with great import. President Nixon tritely but correctly said it was the week that changed the world. This week will not be the week that changes the world — I don't think. And as seems to be fairly typical of the Trump administration, there's really no evidence of serious preparation for this trip. Normally when you go to a summit you have so-called sherpas who go before you and pave the way, reaching agreements or bringing agreements close enough so that the leaders can put them over the top. That does not seem to have happened here. In fact, we have a hurried meeting today, I believe in South Korea, between the Chinese chief negotiator on trade matters and Treasury Secretary Bessent. This has all the earmarks of a last-minute effort to create something that should have been created over months previously.
It's very unclear what will happen in this meeting. President Trump has a group of senior American business executives, primarily from the electronics and cybernetics sector, with him. I'm sure he wants to sell Boeing aircraft to China. We would like to see the recovery of the soybean market that American unreliability has cost us. No doubt there are issues to be discussed about artificial intelligence, where the Chinese are now neck and neck with the United States in the race. The Chinese approach is quite different from that of the United States. The Americans are putting huge amounts of money into an effort to create general intelligence. The Chinese are applying AI to practical projects and doing so remarkably well, with open software rather than the closed software that Silicon Valley develops.
President Trump has contrived a zugzwang, if you will — a situation like the one in chess where any move you make is going to cause you to lose — in the West Asian, Persian Gulf region. I'm sure he would like help from the Chinese to extricate himself from the mess he's created. I don't think that help is going to be forthcoming, despite the fact that the Chinese share an interest with the United States in opening the Strait of Hormuz. China is after all the world's largest trading nation and its principal advocate of free trade, so that interest is shared. But beyond that, I don't see shared interests that would impel the Chinese to do anything concrete.
I think we are now beginning to see the outlines of the post-Iran war future emerge, and they are not favorable to the West. The Chinese probably take the general attitude of: don't interrupt your enemy when he's making a mistake.
The Consequences of the Iran War
Glenn Diesen: I would have liked to see Trump joined by President Putin, meeting with Xi Jinping, and having some kind of great power compromise — some way of solving the huge conflicts which are brewing. But shifting a little on trade, I think more is required now. The talk on Iran will have a key focus, as you suggest. For the Chinese, the US campaign against Iran must feel like it has a Chinese target on it — the efforts to take Venezuela, Iran, and all of these energy suppliers offline essentially for China, as the main peer competitor to the United States.
I thought it was interesting — you said the war in Iran leaves no more good options for the US. I'm sure you saw the article by Robert Kagan essentially reaching the same conclusion. For those not familiar with him, he's one of the leading neoconservatives, co-founder of the Project for the New American Century in the 1990s, and the husband of Victoria Nuland, who had a key role in the regime change in Kiev in 2014. He also recognizes that not only is this war being lost, but unlike Iraq, Yemen, Libya, or Syria, there's no pulling back or ending up in a favorable or acceptable new status quo. This appears to be a massive setback. What exactly can Trump hope to get from the Chinese in such a situation?
Chas Freeman: I don't think he can get very much. I'd agree that Robert Kagan has demonstrated that he's a realist beneath the ideologue he is famous for being. He's a little off in my view on the facts of the war in West Asia — too influenced by Israeli optimism about things. There is quite a Zionist faction in the United States which parrots the Israeli desire and the United Arab Emirates desire to resume kinetic warfare, on the basis, I think, of misperceptions of what the consequences of that would be.
Still, Kagan describes this debacle as the worst defeat of the United States in American history. And I think he's right.
With regard to the Chinese, I think they're less concerned about how this war may relate directly to them than they are about the destruction of the world order that it entails. The United States is now engaged in serial violations of the basic principles of international law, including the launching of aggressive wars with no justification or even explanation, the murder of fishermen on the high seas, the abduction of a sitting president of a sovereign country — whatever you may think of him. This has shown that the rules which the Biden administration claimed to support but didn't are of no value and need not be heeded. I think that is a deep disturbance to the Chinese, and perhaps to the Russians as well.
One result of this war is clearly going to be the cementing of a Sino-Russian relationship with Iran. Let me say why I do think Kagan is on to something. I believe the results of this war with Iran are going to include, among others, Iran's retention of the Strait of Hormuz — it will not be dislodged. Others, like the Indonesians, are now beginning to discuss creating toll booths in the Strait of Malacca and the other straits that go through Indonesia. International law on free navigation through straits, which is enshrined in the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, is now very much in jeopardy. That is not good news for anybody, really, except Iran — which now has the ability, if Israel threatens it, to take action in the strait and energize the entire world against Israel.
Second, I don't think Israel will have the United States at its back if it again attacks Iran. Israel has been chastened, not defeated. But the United States certainly is not going to repeat this error in partnership with Israel in future.
Third, I believe the Gulf Arabs are quietly discussing with Iran the post-war situation — a post-war situation in which there will be no American military presence in the Persian Gulf, because far from constituting a shield, American bases on their territory have constituted a target. They understand that the United States had neither the will nor the ability to defend them against Iran. They understand that Iran is not going away. They understand that Iran's arsenal is largely intact. They understand that Iran is not going to cease improving that arsenal, and therefore they have to make peace with Iran. The terms of that peace are that they cease to host forces hostile to Iran. The holdout is the UAE, which has actually dug deeper into its relationship with Israel and become dependent on Israeli forces for its defense. But that cannot last.
I think the major impact of all this — aside from devaluing sea power, which is a very important result; the fact that the three-mile limit and the twelve-mile limit have now been replaced by a 2,000-kilometer, or 1,500-mile, limit in terms of how close you can get to the enemy you're attempting to subdue — is that Iran has now been deprived of every argument it made against the development of nuclear weapons. I take it from everything I hear that if Iran has not already built a nuclear bomb somewhere underground, it is almost certain to do so. Whether it then follows the Israeli example of denying that it's done what everyone knows it's done, or declares itself a nuclear weapons state as North Korea did and for the same reasons, is an open question.
This war, which came down to an Israeli-American objective of doing through force what the JCPOA — the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — did diplomatically, has now backfired. We have proliferation, and it will not stop with Iran. It will spread to other countries in the region.
One other lasting result of this war, I believe, is that the Gulf Arabs will accelerate their effort to diversify their international relations away from dependence on the United States. You can see this with the Egyptian-Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani partnership, which we've discussed before, and which has both military-industrial consequences and actual defense elements to it, including perhaps extended deterrence by Pakistan against attacks on Saudi Arabia.
Going back to your original question: President Trump in Beijing is an engagement in tactics, not strategy. The Nixon move was strategic, not tactical. This is the opposite. What is really happening of a strategically transformative nature is happening in West Asia.
Robert Kagan, the Rules-Based Order, and the Garden-Jungle Analogy
Glenn Diesen: In terms of this being the worst defeat in US history — Robert Kagan has an interesting book, The Jungle Grows Back, and the main idea is that you have a civilized people who live in a garden with rules, and the rest of the world are the barbarians, the jungle. In the 19th century this kind of garden-and-jungle analogy represented those who can have sovereignty and those who are too barbaric to have it. His whole idea was that the US built an orderly, civilized system by controlling the jungle, but now the jungle is growing back.
Often when people extend this analogy, they point out that once you go out into the jungle, you don't have to follow the same rules as you do in the civilized garden. You do see some of the same ideas now — that we don't have to follow international law, that piracy is acceptable, because that's what we have to do when we operate in the jungle among the savages. Not my language, but it's interesting because Kagan doesn't walk around with sympathies for Iran. As you said, he's a realist — despite all hegemonic aspirations and contempt for Iran, he has the common sense to understand that you do have to operate within the boundaries of reality, and reality is that there won't be any victory here, and in defeat there's no going back to the former status quo either. What do you think will be the wider consequences for the international system? Controlling the Strait of Hormuz, the Iranians can really transform the region — expel the US militarily and even in terms of the dollar. What do you see in the future?
Chas Freeman: As I indicated, at least in the maritime domain, this will overturn the world order. But I see several ironies here.
I remember China very well when it was an outlaw, a rogue state. It called for revolution everywhere. It actually aided revolutionary movements — most of them not very effective, frankly. It aided, for example, the Puerto Rican independence movement, the American Indian Movement, the Black Panthers, and others in the United States who sought the overthrow of the American constitutional order. It wasn't very effective, but symbolically that's where China was. Ironically, that was China as part of the jungle, if you will. But China is now the principal defender of the UN Charter and international law. You cannot find many instances of China violating it. China cuts a corner or two perhaps on the law of the sea, but it is remarkably defensive of the order that the United States sponsored after World War II — the order in which China came to wealth and power. It recognizes the benefits of that.
The jungle has adopted the civilized rules, and the civilized garden has abandoned them. We now hear, as you might expect, a defense of international law from the Global South, because the purpose of law is to protect the weak from the strong and to prevent predation — and we are now a predatory superpower. The West does not distinguish itself by complicity in actions like genocide in West Asia, and it has very little sympathy in terms of NATO enlargement having provoked the Russian invasion of Ukraine, much to Russia's distress as well as to the misery of Ukraine.
We've had a switch. The enemy we now have is who we used to be.
I have an anecdote. I don't know Robert Kagan, but we have a mutual friend. I recall during the NATO-US effort to dismember Serbia in favor of Kosovo that I had an argument with my friend in which I said this was contrary to international law and would set a precedent we would regret — which indeed it did in Crimea. I also added that I thought it was a violation of the entire purpose of American diplomacy in the 20th century, which was to build some sort of reasonable facsimile of the rule of law internationally. We had the Kellogg-Briand Pact, farcical as it was. We had the United Nations, the Geneva Conventions, and other international conventions in which the United States played a leading role. My friend went to Robert Kagan and asked him what he thought about the thesis that American foreign policy had been devoted to building something like the rule of law. And Kagan said, "Oh no, it's all about power." Even then — quite a while ago — he was contemptuous of the rules he extols when he talks about the civilized garden. He didn't believe they bound us. And indeed they have not bound us. That is a great deal of the cause of the mess we're in now.
There is a reason that all the great religious and philosophical thinkers — Confucius, Jesus, Rabbi Hillel in Baghdad earlier, the Buddha — have all come up with some version of the golden rule. "You should not do to others what you do not want them to do to you" is the negative formulation by Confucius and Rabbi Hillel. Jesus was more ambitious: "You should do for others what you hope they will do for you." This is the basis of ethics, and we have tossed it out. We are back to emulating Athens in the Melian Dialogue — which, by the way, did in Athens eventually. Athens set aside its democracy, its respect for diversity of opinion and for the weak, and it found itself on the losing end of the Peloponnesian War. We're making the same mistake, and my guess is it's going to take us quite a while to recover from it.
The Rules-Based Order, Kosovo, and the Domestic Parallel
Glenn Diesen: I've always been a bit critical of what's referred to as the rules-based international order after the Cold War. I tend to trace it back to the Kosovo war in 1999. I actually remember it well — I was in the army then, and I remember the invasion of Yugoslavia. The UN concluded somewhere along the line that it was not legal but it was legitimate. For me, this set the tone for the hegemonic world order, because what it meant was: we have international law in terms of legality, but we can also decouple legitimacy from legality by pointing to liberal democratic values. It was the political West that monopolized this claim — China and Russia couldn't claim to act on liberal democratic values to sideline international law. It became a clause of exception only for us, a prerogative of the West.
After Iraq, you had a lot of political leaders arguing that we needed to formalize something like what we did in 1999 with Yugoslavia — a concert of democracies, a league of democracies, something out of Animal Farm almost: all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others. For me, this became the rules-based international order — international law for all, but with this exception you could claim by appealing to liberal democratic values. It seems this was premised only on a unipolar distribution of power. People like Kagan, if they have a sensible head on their shoulders, would understand that claiming this kind of ideological exceptionalism doesn't work anymore if it's no longer supported by a hegemonic distribution of power. But I'm assuming Trump and Xi won't go into these kinds of issues.
Chas Freeman: There's a very interesting connection between disdain for the rules abroad and disdain for due process at home, because the basic premise is the same. The purpose of due process is the assertion that outcomes are justified by whether they conform to the rules — whether the procedure by which they've been reached is fair. If it is fair, then for example if a court finds something in a law case, whether the decision is in your opinion just or not, if it is fairly arrived at you must accept the quelling of the controversy. The outcome is legitimate and lawful. But now, as you said, we distinguish these. We no longer judge the fairness of elections by whether they were fairly conducted, but by whether they have the right outcome from our point of view. We suspend the Bill of Rights and constitutional protections of individual freedom, or against collective punishment, when we see justification for another approach.
You cannot separate the domestic from the international in this regard. That does indeed raise serious questions about the Chinese performance internationally, because can you have a country that believes not in the rule of law but in rule by law — meaning the sovereign is not subject to the law, but the sovereign can make rules that bind everyone else and change them at will as expediency dictates — and yet be capable of respecting international law abroad? So far, yes. But this also is an expediency, since China has been weak. The weak cling to the law to protect themselves. I wonder where we're headed. We've destroyed the legitimacy of law, and you can relate a lot of the malaise in the West to the collapse of respect for the rule of law, due process, and the decision to legitimize the unlawful.
China's Westphalian Posture and What It Wants from the US
Glenn Diesen: That's not just an American problem — I see this across Europe as well. They already have an outcome they want and the law is applied accordingly where it suits their objectives. Rule by law, as you said.
I was wondering how this puts a dilemma for the Chinese, because on one hand the UN-based system of international law benefited China enormously — since the 1980s there's been a spectacular rise, and they would like for this to continue. But they don't want to live under US rule. I'm not sure if "neo-revisionist" is the right term, or how they want to have the existing system without the US hegemonic part. I don't see a hegemonic intent or capability on the Chinese side — they have too many large powers around them. It's a bit like arguing that Russia wants to dominate the Eurasian continent: there's no evidence and no capability. Usually when you assess a threat you want to look at intentions and capabilities, and I see neither on the Chinese side. What do the Chinese want from the relationship with the Americans?
Chas Freeman: Basically, the Chinese have emerged as the great defenders of the Westphalian peace and the concept that there is a sovereign equality of states, large and small — that every state is entitled to be immune from foreign intervention in its internal affairs. Regime change operations are the most dramatic violation of this order that you could come up with.
The Chinese have a remarkable capacity — it's not really racist, but it's civilizational. If you're Chinese, you're civilized; if you're not Chinese, you're something else, not necessarily savage. The Chinese really don't give a fig how you govern yourself. They're just as respectful of democracies as they are of totalitarian regimes. It's not their business. They don't want to engage in that. This is the curb on Chinese ambition: let the foreigners do what they want. A very old tradition, by the way.
There's an interesting connection which most people don't seem to be aware of between the ancient trading patterns in the Mediterranean, the wool trade in the English Channel, and the Canton trade fair system. The Arabs invented something called the funduq, which means "hotel" now but originally meant a foreign enclave that was self-governing within another society. There were fanādiq — the plural — these hotels, if you will, in major port cities in which foreigners governed themselves. This was the basis later for extraterritorial treaty ports. The Chinese were very comfortable with that, as were the Arabs. They didn't care if a bunch of Christian wool merchants wanted to make their own rules for commerce. Go ahead.
There are reasons to hope that the Chinese will not replicate the Western interpretation of the tribute system. The tribute system was in many ways just a form of state trade, a kind of potlatch — each side provided goods in return for the receipt of goods and tried to outdo each other in their munificence. We interpreted it in the feudal context: if you go to Beijing and deliver copper from mines in Korea, that means you're subordinating yourself to Beijing. Not necessarily.
We're entering a new order, and it's not going to be based on Western precedents because we've basically trashed our own contributions to the garden, if you will. It will be based on something else. And there's an odd thing going on — it's not just the West that is repudiating its own civilizational heritage. We're seeing it repudiated in great countries like India, which is more and more resembling a one-party state, a religious party. Israel has made that transition — it's not a democracy in many ways, even for Jews, and certainly not for anyone else.
We're seeing this interpreted as authoritarianism, as though that were some unique concept. There's no club of authoritarians. I don't think one authoritarian feels he or she has much in common with another authoritarian. This is a category imposed on them by people who pretend to be democratic. But I'm not sure how democratic we really are these days. My own country seems to be a plutocracy. We have 900 billionaires — some of them multi-billionaires — who are dominating and guiding our politics.
There's a very interesting Senate candidate in Maine — I think he may be of Norwegian origin — Graeme Platner, who's conducting town halls. I urge you, if you have some time, to listen to one of them. He perfectly voices the disgruntlement of the masses with an indifferent elite that is basically plundering the society for its own benefit and neglecting the welfare of the common man. I think this is the major thesis now in Western societies everywhere. It's why you have Alternative für Deutschland in Germany, why you have a fascist movement running Italy, and so on. It explains a lot about Donald Trump — not his mental condition, which is a different issue.
China's Strategic Interests Versus US Objectives in Iran
Glenn Diesen: I liked what you said about China being a Westphalian country. In my last book I also wrote about Eurasian Westphalianism, because in the Westphalian system the whole point was to focus on the distinctiveness of each culture, of each state, which supports the concept of sovereign equality — essentially the opposite of a hegemonic system, in which the hegemon pushes universalism, the idea that they can represent other people, as after the French Revolution, the Bolshevik Revolution, or indeed after the Cold War.
Getting back to China and Trump — the Chinese would have an interest in seeing Iran succeed here, to push the US out of that region. How do you see each side playing their cards? We know what the Chinese want, we know what the US wants. How is each side positioned to push their agenda vis-à-vis the other?
Chas Freeman: I don't think there's going to be any meeting of the minds at all. The Israeli objective, which the United States has embraced, is the destruction of the Iranian state. The Chinese objective is the bolstering of the Iranian state. You're quite correct — the Westphalian tradition lives on. The Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence are a brilliant summary of it. Read them and you will find all of the essence of the results of Westphalia. All of these elements are in that statement, which very much guides China.
Everyone in the world has an opportunity to become Chinese, in which case they might care what we do with each other — but if we don't become Chinese, they really couldn't care less how the inmates in foreign countries treat each other. This is the opposite of the messianic traditions of Western ideology. There's no mission civilisatrice, no religious missionary element. The Chinese are not trying to convert anyone to their way of life. They in fact say that their ideology, such as it is, is so particular it cannot be applied elsewhere. They leave it up to others to find lessons from their achievements. They don't insist, as the United States does, that you conform to their values if you want a good relationship with them. So they have a great relationship with all sorts of countries that have virtually nothing in common with them, except of course a desire to make money.
This is the one point on which Donald Trump and the Chinese appear to agree. In the West Asian war, the Iran war, he may have impoverished the defense department and depleted its weaponry, but he's made a lot of money for himself and his family. If there's any winner in this war — in addition to the Russian Federation, which collects another hundred million dollars a month for every ten-dollar rise in the price of oil, making considerable dollars now on a monthly basis — then it's Donald Trump and the Trump family. One has to suspect that the remarkably well-timed oil trading futures activity that precedes by about twenty minutes the announcement of some statement about where the situation in West Asia is going is not an accident, and that the principal beneficiaries of it are the people making those statements.
If Donald Trump lives to the end of his term — which is looking less and less likely — one of the consequences is going to be yet another travesty. We've gotten into the habit in many societies — I think of South Korea as an example — that once someone's out of office, they're prosecuted. Pinochet was accepted while he was in office, then he got out and they took him to court and locked him up if they could before he died. The president of South Korea is jailed, the prime minister of Thailand, and so forth. Donald Trump would like to accuse President Obama of treason and lock him up, and last night he said that Hillary Clinton should be sent to Haiti, which is not a place that many people want to go to these days.
The Emerging Post-Hegemonic World Order
Glenn Diesen: I always wonder if it's possible that China will change over time, if one assumes that the distribution of power essentially shapes intentions. How China speaks today has a great resemblance to the way the United States spoke as well — the US was also non-interventionist, some would call it isolationist, wanting to be an example to be emulated. Some would argue it was perhaps Woodrow Wilson who first took that step, arguing to make the world safe for democracy — shifting from a more passive position to a more active missionary one. It will be interesting to see if Chinese rhetoric will change as its power grows.
Chas Freeman: They seem less hypocritical than we were. At the very moment we were proclaiming our intention not to follow the example of the British in building an empire, we were building an empire. We had a slave population. We were conducting genocide against the indigenous inhabitants of North America. We overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy. And by the way, Robert Kagan's jungle-versus-garden dichotomy is very racist. We've had European leaders — you know who they are — who have used the same analogy in a very racist fashion. The Chinese are unique only in that they're more tactful about their view of foreigners.
I think the world we're getting into is going to reaffirm a kind of anarchic version of the Peace of Westphalia, with many middle-ranking powers maneuvering at will. It'll be a more complex geometry than the balance of power in Europe in the 19th century, which did maintain a measure of stability and keep wars under control for a century. I don't know that you can do that with the number of actors in the world that we're acquiring.
If you look at the Persian Gulf, for example, I think the Saudis and the Iranians are going to be dealing with each other on a nominal basis of equality — though neither of them really regards the other as an equal. The only thing they will have in common in the Persian Gulf of the future is that they will look to Russia and China, and perhaps India as well, more than they do to the United States to maintain peace and stability and foster development.
Glenn Diesen: There was the EU foreign policy chief, former one, Josep Borrell, who made that comment four years ago — that the jungle is growing back, and it's not enough to build tall walls to protect our beautiful civilized gardens from the savages outside the gates. It's also necessary for the Europeans to go out and trim the jungle and civilize it and make it more like us. So yeah, it's an interesting analogy with very heavy 19th-century racist undertones.
Chas Freeman: There's a bit of pride in Western civilization. My ancestor John Winthrop came up with the notion of the shining city on the hill. But it isn't shining very much these days, and the so-called savages in the jungle take a very dim view of what's going on inside this allegedly civilized garden.
I think sometimes people denigrate eunuchs, but you know, eunuchs ran empires very effectively. They kept the Byzantine Empire going for hundreds of years beyond where it should have. But the problem with the eunuchs is that they're very self-centered. They sit within the walls of the city or the empire — the Forbidden City in China — and they play games with each other and don't really concern themselves with what's going on outside. I think the world as a whole now looks at the West in basically the same way that common people regarded the eunuchs in these earlier imperial apparatuses. We're not highly regarded. We have a moral taint about us. We are regarded as hypocrites with double standards. And there is something to that.
Trump as Supplicant — Final Assessment
Glenn Diesen: Yeah, hard to dispute that these days. I'll be keeping my eyes on this meeting between Trump and Xi. Hopefully something good can come out of it, because something bad could come out of it too.
Chas Freeman: I'm a little apprehensive, because we have a very temperamental Mr. Trump meeting a very stalled, self-controlled Mr. Xi. Donald Trump takes offense and blows his top — he's not the epitome of cool. We shall see. I will heave a sigh of relief if nothing bad happens. I would very much like something good to happen. Low expectations might be the ticket here.
Glenn Diesen: I do know that Trump ideally would have gone to Beijing having defeated Iran — able to show off to China, pointing out we took out Iran, now maybe time to fall in line. But I guess he will come with something rather different.
Chas Freeman: He's a supplicant. He's not arriving as a victor. He's arriving as a supplicant from a country that has exhausted itself in war, which is mired in debt, which is domestically unstable, divided, and polarized — where his own legitimacy, measured by polling data, is sinking and not rising. He's not in a strong position. I hope he enjoys the military parades and other things that will be staged for him.
Glenn Diesen: I'm always thinking something good can come from this. If Iran becomes the final gravestone of hegemonic aspirations, and Trump can lower the ambitions — if the US can pull back, restore the republic, be one of many centers of power — then within that format it would be much easier to find common ground with China, Russia, and Iran as well. If we can move beyond the hegemonic system and join in on the Westphalian world order that our counterparts in the East are pushing, it would suddenly open up a huge diplomatic space for making peace.
Chas Freeman: It may come, because the American people have not suffered any significant pain during this debacle. But this summer, prices of gas at the pump, inflation, shortages of this, that, and the other are all going to make life quite difficult for many people. We have the example of the surge of opposition to bad government that we've seen in Hungary. Something like that could happen in the United States, in which case the way would be paved for reconsideration of the kinds of ill-considered behavior you're describing — in another administration, not this one.
Clearly we're at some sort of sea change in history, some sort of turning point. We're not sure where this is going to lead us. But at the moment it's pretty alarming.
Glenn Diesen: Very much so. Well, thank you very much for your analysis. I always look forward to getting your perspective. Thank you again, and have a pleasant evening.