Preet Bharara:

From Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Welcome to Stay Tuned. I’m Preet Bharara.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

The war in Ukraine changed geopolitics, fundamentally. The energy shock has accelerated the greens transition, but also made it much trickier and much more complicated. And we’re now in a completely different inflationary environment. So you add all of those up, the world is very different.

Preet Bharara:

That’s Zanny Minton Beddoes. She’s the editor-in-chief of The Economist, the weekly international periodical founded in 1843. Beddoes has been a journalist at The Economist since 1994, and in 2015, she became the first woman to lead the storied publication. We last spoke on this podcast nearly three years ago during the early days of the pandemic, when the world was in a much different place than it is today. Beddoes joins me to discuss the state of US-China relations, whether AI technology should be regulated and an unexpected silver lining of Russia’s war in Ukraine. That’s coming up. Stay tuned.

Before I get to your questions, there’s exciting news from Cafe. The new season of Up Against the Mob, hosted by Elie Honig, is here. You can listen to the first episode now. Just search for and follow Up Against the Mob in your listening app. And now, onto your questions.

QUESTION AND ANSWER:

This question comes in a tweet from Twitter user, @BBBWMB. You should think about maybe buying a vowel. The question is, do all criminal trials require a grand jury before indictment? Well, that’s a great question. And the answer is found with respect to federal law actually, in the United States Constitution itself. And where in the Constitution? Well, in the Fifth Amendment, which is known for some other provisions less than it’s known for the Grand Jury Clause. The Fifth Amendment provides, “No person shall be held to answer for a capital or otherwise infamous crime unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury.” There are some exceptions for cases arising as the Constitution provides in the land or naval forces or in the militia, or an actual service in time of war or public danger.

But generally speaking, every single felony criminal case in the federal system must be brought by indictment. Couple of exceptions. One is misdemeanors need not be presented to a grand jury. And by misdemeanor, that, by definition, a crime for which you cannot serve more than one year in prison. It’s also possible, as with many rights, that someone who’s a defendant can waive the right to a grand jury indictment. And in that case, the US attorney for the particular jurisdiction can proceed by what’s called a criminal information in which it’s not the grand jury that makes the allegations, but the United States attorney who makes the allegations and after the judge makes sure that the waiver is voluntary and knowing with advice of counsel, you can proceed.

That often happens when people are pleading guilty pursuant to a cooperation agreement. There’s no reason to put the government to the burden of going to the grand jury, although it’s not much of a burden. That gets negotiated and the person pleads guilty and cooperates with the government. Happens all the time. Now, what about in the States? Well, unlike many other provisions of the Constitution, the Grand Jury Clause of the Fifth Amendment has not yet been incorporated against the States. As a practical matter, I think virtually every state in the country has some provision for a criminal grand jury process. However, a number of states don’t proceed primarily by grand jury. They proceed by what’s known as a preliminary hearing where probable cause is established by a judge so that the criminal case can proceed.

This question comes in an email from Mike. “Preet, do you think Mike Pence will get out of testifying in the January 6th investigation? I heard both Trump and Pence are fighting the subpoena.” So that’s an interesting question in one that Joyce Vance and I have talked about on the Insider Podcast more than once. It’s not surprising that both Trump and Pence are trying to prevent testimony pursuant to the subpoena. And as you’ve also learned, if you listen to the podcast for any length of time, the likelihood of succeeding in avoiding testimony under a subpoena from a criminal grand jury is much, much lower than avoiding testimony from a congressional committee. Pence successfully avoided that in part because his subpoena was never issued to Mike Pence, and that’s a matter of some controversy with respect to the January 6th committee, partly as we know now, that was a strategic decision because the January 6th committee did have testimony from people who were very close to Mike Pence, including his chief counsel, including his chief of staff, and they’re allowed to use hearsay evidence for purposes of making their report.

So I presume they thought that given the fact that they had that evidence and that testimony, and also the fact that the clock was ticking and the committee was likely to come to an end because power changed hands in the Congress, they decided not to send a subpoena to Mike Pence. Not so with the special counsel who’s overseeing the January 6th investigation. Trump and his lawyers are making the usual broad blanket statements about executive privilege. I don’t know how much a court will put stock in that. More interestingly, and somewhat cleverly, Mike Pence and his lawyers are making the argument that because part of Mike Pence’s role, on the day in question, January 6th, his role was to act ministerially as a president of the Senate because that’s one of the roles of the vice president. And therefore, is entitled to the protection of a clause in the Constitution, the speech or debate clause, which says he can’t be made to answer for things he does in his official duties as a member of the Congress.

And if that seems like too cute an argument by half, it’s because it is a little bit. That’s how I feel about it. Will a judge accept the argument? I don’t know. But one reason why people speculate that it’s a stronger argument then it seems at first on its face is that there have been administrations before, including democratic administrations who have made arguments about the protections that a vice president is accorded because of that dual role as president of the Senate, someone who breaks ties or does something ministerial like Mike Pence was supposed to do on January 6th, which was to certify the results of the election.

My prediction, at the end of the day, is that Mike Pence will be forced to testify in some manner and with respect to some scope of the questions that are being put to him by the grand jury. He’s not going to get blanket immunity either based on the speech or debate clause argument or the executive privilege argument. There are lots and lots of reasons why. There are things that he and President Trump discussed that would be important enough to overcome the privilege or the speech of debate clause argument.

It’s also the case that the government will argue some amount of waiver has taken place because Mike Pence has written a book in which he talks about a lot of things, including things that I’m sure the grand jury will want to know and prosecutors will want to ask questions about, that have already been divulged. And peripheral to the things that have been divulged also, which have probably been waived. I think the other possibility is we don’t see a conclusion of the litigation about the grand jury and there’s some negotiated end to the impasse. Part of what’s going on here, I believe is not that Mike Pence has such a deep-seated belief in a principle of the speech or debate clause or the executive privilege argument or anything else but a political situation he’s in.

He’s running for president in 2024. Most likely one of his rivals will be his former boss, President Donald Trump, former President Donald Trump. And Pence does not want to further alienate Donald Trump’s space by looking like he’s too eager to testify in a way that would be to the detriment of Donald Trump. So he’s got to fight this, I think more for optics and political reasons than for principle reasons. At the end of the day, it may be the case and it often happens that the Department of Justice, the Special Counsel and Mike Pence and his lawyers will come up with some understanding and agreement by which he gives some testimony and doesn’t give other testimony.

We’ll be right back with my conversation with Zanny Minton Beddoes.

THE INTERVIEW:

Zanny Minton Beddoes began her career at The Economist three decades ago as an emerging markets correspondent. Since becoming editor-in-chief in 2015, she’s overseen significant subscriber growth and increased the weekly publication’s digital presence around the world. Zanny Minton Beddoes, welcome back to the show.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Thank you for having me again.

Preet Bharara:

As we were discussing right before we hit the record button, you are coming to us on tape from the Kingdom that is still United. Am I right?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

The Kingdom that is in me still United. Yep.

Preet Bharara:

And you are actually in, I imagine some posh Economist office and studio, correct? While I’m in the basement of my home.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Well, I don’t know about posh, but I am in a studio in the Economist office. I’m not in my home office.

Preet Bharara:

I’m is everyone back?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

I’m back in the office. Well, I’m back and I’m back every day. I’ve kind of had it with homeworking and many of my colleagues are back. We don’t have any strict rules, but many people are here and people come in several days a week. There’s no, you must be in Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. Different teams come in different days. But increasingly, it feels very vibrant and certainly interestingly more vibrant than our New York office.

Preet Bharara:

So as we were also discussing before we began the show, you were last here in May of 2020 on the show almost three years. What would the Zanny of May, 2020 think of the thinking of Zanny in March of 2023?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Whoa, that is a metaphysical question. Let me get my head around that. What would I have thought-

Preet Bharara:

Well, that’s another way of asking how surprising, looking back, has the last three years been?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Oh my goodness. It’s been just one extraordinary surprise, after another. May, 2020, we were in the middle of the pandemic, in the middle of the lockdown. We didn’t really have a sense in which what was going to remain changed, how dramatically the world was going to change. And then of course, May, 2020 was pre the invasion of Ukraine, which has been I think the sort of single biggest dramatic shift to the world in the last three years beyond the pandemic because it’s had a number ancillary knock on effects, and we can talk about them. But one was it’s caused a kind of warp speed transformation of the European energy system and it exacerbated, I guess, the other really big shock of last year, which was the inflationary shock.

May, 2020, we’d never heard of transitory inflation at that point, I don’t think, and now we’re in a world that macroeconomically, at least 2022, looked much, much more like the early 1980s. But I think the war in Ukraine changed geopolitics fundamentally. The energy shock has accelerated the greens transition, but also made it much trickier and much more complicated and we’re now in a completely different inflationary environment. So you add all of those up, the world is very different. I think there’s this much overused phrase of the post-war global order.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Whatever that was, it’s different now.

Preet Bharara:

Well, we’re going to come to each of those things that you mentioned one by one. But first I want to read back to you a headline in The Economist Under your own byline, and it reads Why a global recession is inevitable in 2023. That was from last November. Why are you scaring everybody’s, Zanny?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Well, I think I may well be proved wrong on that, which shows that you should never make any predictions about the future.

Preet Bharara:

So I wondered about that because I’m not hearing just anecdotally there are a lot of concerns about recession and certainly perhaps a global recession. But I also have the feeling from people who are in the financial world that there’s some hopefulness that all of that is avoided and people can start spending again relatively soon. So why did you make the prediction you made and what’s changed?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

I guess the word I would regret from that is inevitable. I think you should probably never say things are inevitable. But why it looked very likely when I wrote that in October that the world economy as a whole would be in recession and that technically means growth, kind of slow growth, people call that a global recession, was a combination of very high energy prices after the invasion of Ukraine. At that point, still a totally closed down Chinese economy because of the zero COVID rules and a European economy that was really, really being hit very, very hard, a US economy that was slowing. So even at the beginning of this year, there was a sort of general viewer that a recession was very likely albeit, and I think I said in that piece it would be a mild one in the US.

Several things have changed since then. One is that we had an incredibly mild winter in Europe, which meant that the much kind of feared renewed spike in energy prices didn’t materialize. Secondly, the Chinese, if you remember at the beginning of December, went from the most Draconian zero COVID policies to completely discarding them overnight with the result that the Chinese economy is bouncing back much, much more dramatically than anybody anticipated. And thirdly, and I think this is the bit that certainly I underestimated, is the strength both of the US labor market and the strength of the US consumer.

And with hindsight, the fact that consumer savings was so strong and businesses are actually in very good shape means that there is a resilience in the US economy that is sort of even stronger than I had anticipated. And so I think it is possible, notwithstanding the fairly substantial increase in interest rates that the US skirts recession. Now, there are lots of complications that come from that, not least for the Fed because it means that it’s going to be harder to get inflation sustainably down anywhere near the fed’s target. But look, it’s great news and good news should be celebrated. So if I’m wrong, I’m delighted to be wrong.

Preet Bharara:

So America skirting a recession is inevitable?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

I’m not using the word inevitable any longer. Certainly not on your show.

Preet Bharara:

I think you’ve also written and you implied this in your comments just now, that the US is doing well and doing better than both Europe and China. How much of that is attributable to COVID and the COVID response?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

I don’t think a lot actually. Well, some. Because one of the biggest things that happened to the US was the scale of the COVID response. And cumulatively, if you add together the stimulus that happened under President Trump and then the stimulus that happened under President Biden, it’s cumulatively something on the order of 25% of US GDP over several years. It was a huge, huge fiscal stimulus, which was part of the reason that inflation accelerated because there was just so much demand that came from that. But it also meant that there’s a huge cushion of support. And as a result, a huge cushion that US consumers have, US states got a bunch of money. It sort of added to the fuel driving the US economy. But I’d also add a couple of other things. One has been the combination of three subsequent pieces of legislation that the Biden administration has passed. The Infrastructure bill, the CHIPS Act, and then the extraordinarily ineptly named Inflation Reduction Act, which is really a climate bill coupled with, sort of masquerading as a national security bill and a kind of bring jobs home bill.

But it means that there is an enormous amount of subsidy and industrial policy in the US designed to accelerate green technologies and that is creating a huge incentive for investment. So there’s been a ton of government support in the US. We did some calculations that by some metrics, the US now spends more industrial policy as a share it’s economy than France, and France is famously de resiste. But all of this has been abut for the US economy. And you saw what happened to the dollar last year, which soared because the Fed was raising rates, but also because growth prospects in the US are much stronger than Europe and China. And just a couple of words on Europe, has really, really been hit by the war in Ukraine and the rise in energy prices. Don’t forget the US is an energy giant and Europe is an energy importer.

And although the Europeans have reacted and in some ways remarkably so. Germany in particular, went from, I think it was 55% of its natural gas came from Russia, huge reliance to really transforming that overnight in a way that not many people expected. But as a result, energy prices are much, much higher in Europe and European industry is being hit. And lots of European industry is thinking about, well, there’s huge subsidies if I invest in the United States available. So benefit to the US economy relatively harder hit European economy.

And then China now doing better now that it’s abandoned zero COVID but also has some long-term challenges. One is the kind of aftershock of President Xi Jinping’s clamp down on the big tech sectors. He’s got a very status party dominated economic model and he really clamped down famously on Jack Ma and Alibaba, but other big tech giants. And so the environment there is much trickier. And secondly, the property sector in China is in a real mess and they haven’t sorted out that mess. And then thirdly, on a kind of longer term perspective, Chinese demography isn’t so great. One interesting thing that is happening in 2023 is that India is overtaking China as the world’s most populous country this year. And China’s medium term demographic outlook really is quite dramatically bad.

Preet Bharara:

I keep wondering if I should take birthplace pride in the fact that my native country will be overtaking China as the world’s most populous. Is that a good thing for either China or India, or not?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

One of the things that actually has happened since you and I last spoke is that I’ve started to be able to travel again, which has just been wonderful. And I spent a couple of weeks in India last year, which was just so eyeopening. I hadn’t been there since before the pandemic and I hadn’t really appreciated the kind of dynamism that is now in the Indian economy. Now there are some real challenges in Indian politics and we can talk about that if you like.

And I worry about the kind of Hindu nationalist chauvinism and sort of authoritarian almost tendencies in the politics. But if you look at the economy, not just is it a sort of young and dynamic population, but it is one where you really see the consequences of having a huge labor force of tech savvy people. You see the consequences of having created [inaudible 00:18:59] which was the sort of personal ID system and a tech stack based on that. And so you’ve been able to create a digital economy really remarkably quickly and as a result, you know better than I do, a sort of famously fragmented, inefficient economy is becoming a truly national economy. And so I sort of left there really quite upbeat about India’s economic prospects provided the politics doesn’t mess it up. And I think that unlike China, India has demography on its side right now.

Preet Bharara:

Meaning robust youth.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Yeah, yeah. You’ve got a population that is a much younger population moving into the labor market and provided you can find jobs for these people and grow the economy, there’s a labor force there that will power economic growth in a way that China is seeing a decline in its labor force and a decline in its population.

Preet Bharara:

Maybe we’ll get back to Indian politics in a few minutes. But I want to talk about the implications of what you said a few minutes ago, for American politics. You mentioned three pieces of legislation that you suggest have made the American economy more resilient and these things have been good, including the CHIPS bill, the Climate bill, the Infrastructure bill. Should Joe Biden be getting more credit for the resilience of the American economy than he’s getting?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

So you asked me why the US economy had done better than many might have expected in the short term, and I gave that as an answer. Whether or not they, in the long term, make the US economy more resilient I think is a huge bet. And the logic of the Biden administration is that you need to have this, let’s call it industrial policy for want want of a better word. But you need to have this government focus on the economy both for national security reasons. So the CHIPS Act is big subsidies to provide for semiconductor capacity in the United States. The infrastructure bill is big subsidies to boost American infrastructure also in part so that the US economy can flourish relative to China. And then the inflation reduction act as we discussed, is essentially to boost green technology but also to create jobs in the United States.

And there’s a very clear sort of protectionist veneer over the inflation reduction act, the green technologies have to be, to get the credits, the tax credits which are supposed to drive this investment, new stuff has to be produced in the United States. So it’s kind of China focused national security policy meets a kind of protectionist made in Americanism meets climate policy. Now, does all of that make the US more resilient? Well, the Biden administration would say yes because it strengthens, it’s going to remake America’s economy, it’s going to rebuild jobs, it’s going to undo the damage that came from the kind of free trade era of the globalists and it’s going to make a stronger US economy. Now, the Economist is a good free trading newspaper. I’m skeptical of some of that. I get the focus on national security, although I do think maybe we can talk about it.

I think there is a bipartisan focus on China that sort of veers into serious protectionism. You’ve got, of course, the United States needs to worry about China. But it’s really getting quite extreme. And I’m not so sure that the kind of protectionist trappings that are around this domestic industrial policy are really going to be very good for the US economy. In general, history doesn’t suggest that industrial policy works. Governments aren’t very good at picking winners and losers are very good at finding governments. But maybe the US will prove things different this time around. It’s basically a huge gamble. And in the short term, I’ve no doubt it’s going to boost US growth because it’s sucking an investment, sucking in interest from around the world. It’s possible that the US pulls this off, but it’s also possible that a huge amount of money is going to be wasted.

Preet Bharara:

You mentioned the bipartisanship surrounding China, and I’ve talked about that on this podcast on a number of occasions. And I quote a government official who said to me, “That of all things going on, on Capitol Hill, there’s maybe most overlap on reaction to China and we’re in a moment where it is impossible to be too harsh on China.” Do you see that persisting for a while or just in the medium term or what?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Yeah, I would completely agree with that. And I think it’s really struck me that every time I go to the US it’s the one thing that I can find people on both sides agreeing on. You cannot be too tough on China. And what’s worrying about that is that it develops its own logic because for every politician, the risk is to be branded soft on China. No one can afford to be branded soft on China. And so there’s a kind of ineluctable logic towards greater hawkishness and I think there’s a real risk that this gets out of control. Look at the sort of way in which the rhetoric on Taiwan has grown more heated. Look at the response to balloon gate. Even after the very clear attempt in the G20 summit when Xi Jinping met Joe Biden and there was a very clear sense that both sides wanted to kind of ratchet down the temperature, that hasn’t really lasted very long.

And I think it hasn’t really lasted very long in part because of the domestic political pressure. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not in any sense belittling the risks from China. China has become much more authoritarian, much more aggressive. I’m actually going to China this month. We’re recording this in March and I’m going in a couple of weeks for the first time since the pandemic. So I will have a much better sense when I get back about what it’s really like. But my sense already is that it’s become a very different place than it was even four or five years ago. So I’m not kind of belittling concerns about China, but I do think there is a sense in which the US is risking some of the underpinnings which have for decades been the sort of hallmarks of American strength.

And let me just give a couple of examples. One, to go back to the whole industrial policy meets protectionism, this view that everything has to be seen through the prism of national security and concern about China can very easily be interpreted by the rest of the world and indeed is being interpreted. The US which used to be the country that believed in multilateralism, believed in the kind of rules-based international economic order that it’s set up is now flouting all of those rules. It’s using its weaponizing economic policy, it’s imposing export controls, it’s using massive subsidies in the name of concerns about China. But in the rest of the world that’s seen a little bit as the US wants to keep China down and doesn’t seem to care about breaking indeed completely flouting the rules that it itself set up. So there’s a zero-sum nature I think to US thinking about China. Anything that’s good for China must be bad for the US.

And the whole basis of multilateral trade and globalization, which I know are kind of tricky words for many people, but the whole basis was that everybody could win from this. And so there is, I think, a sort of zero-sum about American attitudes to China. And at the same time, the US is not doing some of the things or not seeing I think some of the things that make the US much stronger, vis-a-vis China.

One example I would give is immigration. One big difference between the US and China, the biggest and second biggest economies in the world, is that I’ve never heard of anyone who particularly wants to immigrate to China. It’s not a magnet that people are rushing, desperate to go and live in Beijing. But there are many, many, many people around the world who are desperate to go and live in the United States. That’s traditionally been one of the US’s great strengths. And yet, the current state of immigration policy or indeed the lack thereof in the US means that it has kind of closed that door or largely closed it and it no longer has that lever that used to be one of the ingredients that made the US so much longer.

Preet Bharara:

You wrote also a few months ago that economic decoupling between the world’s two biggest economies is becoming a reality, those economies obviously being the US and China. What does that mean? How can decoupling actually happen, given how much interconnectedness there is? And is it a good thing, is it a bad thing or is it just the reality?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

You are absolutely right. The two economies are incredibly intertwined. And you can say, well, actually trade flows are as high as they ever were. But if you look at what companies are doing, and if you look at companies particularly that have China as a big part of their supply chain, they’re all looking at, and boardrooms are full of discussions of how do we diversify, how do we make sure we’re not totally reliant on China? And China plus one strategy has become one of the kind of buzzwords in boardrooms around the world. People want to try and move some of their production elsewhere. It’s already happened in many lower value add industries to places like Indonesia, Vietnam, India is a big beneficiary of this. But it’s very, very hard because supply chains are so interlinked. So it’s not very dramatic yet, but it’s clearly happening. And the high-tech sector, it’s happening very clearly because of these really quite Draconian US export controls where it’s just impossible to export certain high-tech.

Preet Bharara:

What is the degree of China’s concern about this ongoing decoupling and what is it doing about it?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Well, I think it is a concern for China. But China’s also pushing its own decoupling because it’s obviously a risk for China to rely on inputs for the United States and it also wants to boost its own capacity, whether it’s in semiconductors and so forth. And so you have both sides now driven by a sense that in strategic sectors, and they both have a very expansive definition of strategic sectors, they cannot rely on the other, and in fact, it’s dangerous to rely on the other and they want supremacy in these strategic sectors.

So I’ve no doubt that China is determined to try and have what it sees as supremacy in strategic sectors. And we’re in the midst of, and I think we talked about this last time, you were kind enough to have me on your show, we are in the midst of this incredible technological revolution where we’ve still got a long, long, long way to go. But areas like AI, quantum, all these new frontiers that everyone knows are going to define power in the 21st century because those who dominate those very new technologies are going to have the power. And so both sides are determined to be the ones that do that.

Preet Bharara:

So if both sides are speeding towards or at least walking briskly towards decoupling because of concern about overreliance and in a desire to be diversified, it seems to me an important question arises. And I’ve asked this question of other people as well and I’ll ask it of you, does the world need China more than China needs the world or does the US need China more than China needs the US? And does the answer to that question give you some sense of who emerges victorious, whatever that means in the medium and long term?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

So both sides will be worse off if we go into this decoupling further, and the world will be worse off. There’s no doubt that this is going to be incredibly economically costly.

Preet Bharara:

You’re saying that’s inevitable.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

I think some decoupling has already happened, so I’m perfectly willing to say things that have already happened.

Preet Bharara:

Okay. Well, it just sounded like you were being very strident for-

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

No, I do think more is inevitable actually, because I don’t think there’ll be a sort of complete decoupling. It’s not going to be the kind of former Soviet Union which had virtually no economic ties with the West. They were two completely different economic ecosystems. This is a very different situation to that because these two economies are so intertwined. But I think that increasingly, as you’re already seeing in the very cutting edge chip technology, you’re going to see more of that and you are going to see, I suspect more controls on US outward investment into China. There’s already a lot of talk about that. There’ll be more controls on inward investment. There’ll be more controls on what kinds of technologies, suppose dual use technologies, which those that can be used for military and civilian purposes in this world of quantum AI and so forth. It’s a pretty broad range of technologies.

We haven’t got onto Ukraine yet, but one of the things that we learn from the Ukraine war is just quite how much civilian technology is useful in military terms now, drones, whatever. And so I think that this is going to continue because I don’t see any political change in China. I don’t mean regime change, but I don’t see any kind of real change in the outlook of China. China, under Xi Jinping, is clearly gone in a much more assertive, aggressive, nationalist authoritarian direction. It’s always been a one party state, but it’s come much, much more aggressively so. And US concern, as we’ve talked about, is bipartisan and very hard to undo that domestic dynamic. And you have a very clear flashpoint in the form of Taiwan.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I was just about to ask you about Taiwan. So on the one hand, I think you’ve suggested that Chinese invasion of Taiwan is no longer implausible in part because of this decoupling. On the other hand, there are those who suggest that the example and the model of how it’s going for Russia and Ukraine put some weight in the other direction. How would you do the analysis on what will happen in Taiwan?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

I’m certainly not going to use the word inevitable. Taiwan really worries me.

Preet Bharara:

But does it worry you more or less than 13 months ago?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

We put on our cover, I think it was a couple of years ago, the most dangerous place on earth with a picture of the Taiwan straits, a map of the Taiwan straits. I don’t think I can get much strong than that. I think it’s still the most dangerous place on earth. Taiwan is one of those things where it is clearly China’s stated goal to ensure the reunification, or as it sees, the incorporation of the renegade territory into China. And the US position of strategic ambiguity, which is the one that officially has been in place for decades, I think the reality of the US position has shifted somewhat. And the investment that is going into the PLA, Chinese military, and the nature of the scale at which they are acquiring capability is really dramatic. And you’re right that I think what’s happened in Ukraine may have given some pause in terms of a recognition that actually the west came together much more perhaps than Xi Jinping might have thought in advance.

But there are big differences. The integration that we’ve been talking about is so much closer that any notion of major sanctions on China will have by themselves much more dramatic global impact. And the consequences of a military conflict between the US and China is a sort of catastrophically bad. We’ve been doing a lot of work on China and we have some big pieces coming out. And two things strike me the more I read about it. One is that when you read in detail the military planning and the kind of war gaming, it’s just absolutely terrifying. And at the same time, the more you learn about Taiwan and the mood in Taiwan and how Taiwanese feel, I think it’s important ways, quite different to Ukraine. It’s a country that is sort of still trying to work out what its attitude is towards this extremely scary situation.

Preet Bharara:

We’ll be right back with more of my conversation with Zanny Minton Beddoes after this. One of the reasons things have gone south for Russia in Ukraine is that it has a terrible military and there’s corruption in its ranks and the machinery and the weaponry is outdated and we overestimated them. No one is overestimating the Chinese military in its operations. Correct?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Well, we don’t know that. Had we had this conversation the 22nd of January, 2022, you might have said to me, “Well, the Russian military that’s massing on the borders of Ukraine is a pretty serious military. And I think that was-

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, well everyone thought that Kyiv would fit fall within days.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Exactly, exactly. Everyone thought Kyiv would fall. And so I’m not sure I would want to extrapolate from that. The Chinese military is untested. They are spending a huge amount on it. It’s now got more naval ships than the US military. They’ve been investing like crazy, but they haven’t actually been involved in conflict. And so it’s not clear how well it would perform. And I’ve learned from this time last year, and the Russian ministries, which performed remarkably differently to what anyone was expecting. So that’s one where… I was going to say one would have to wait and see, but I hope we never see. So I hope this is never tested.

Preet Bharara:

I hope also. You said something earlier in the conversation about the political situation in the United States insofar as no one can be seen to be branded as soft on China. But there are people in the political system, not a lot, but some who do not mind being branded as soft on Russia. Why would that be?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

So I don’t think those people would say they were being soft on Russia. But I know what you mean. And I think there are people particularly on the sort of fringes or the kind of outer edges of the Republican Party who clearly think that there is mileage in going down the route of why are we spending so much on Ukraine? What’s the point of this?

Preet Bharara:

And Russia is not our enemy.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Indeed. And there’s no US strategic interest and the real interest is China. I, of course, think that’s completely wrong. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and that what happens there is it’s an absolute test case of whether we live in a world where might makes right and it’s okay to go and invade your neighbor. And Russia thinks it is in an existential struggle with the West and it will be a huge, huge loss of kind of sense globally of Western resolve, somehow, if Ukraine is defeated. And of course I would say this living in Europe and having been there. I went to Kyiv almost a year ago exactly, actually three weeks after the war started and was the first outside journalist to come to Kyiv to meet Zelensky.

And it was profoundly, profoundly affecting and I felt very viscerally what everyone who has gone there feels, which is that I was going into an environment that I knew only from World War II films. And for those of us in Europe, I think it’s very, very real. Not just because it’s less than two hours flight from London. You fly to Warsaw, you get on a train, you’re at the border and you’re in Europe, but suddenly, you’re in this war zone.

So I say that because it does feel different if you’re in the United States and I’ve been in the US a few times in the last year. But what is striking to me is how the Biden administration and president himself really understand what is at stake here. And actually, so do you the leadership of the Republicans in Congress. And I’m struck that there are many, many Republicans who are very determined to continue the support and understand what is at stake. I was just at the Munich Security Conference a couple of weeks, a few weeks ago, and there are huge numbers of senators and congressmen. But there are definitely people within the Republican Party who have a much different attitude and no doubt see some kind of electoral gain in that.

Preet Bharara:

You refer to them as fringe and I think that’s an apt label. But the fringe is getting larger.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Yeah, you’re right. You’re right. And I used fringe-

Preet Bharara:

And the fringe moves.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

As I was saying fringe, I thought that probably underplays it. It is still a minority view, substantially minority view. But over time, that may well change. And I also think that as we go into ’24, in the US, in the Republican primaries, this will become a kind of defining position for some it already differentiates some of the, well the one candidate who is declared and some of the kind of those who haven’t but everyone assumes will be candidates. At the same time, I think that’s why this year is so important because too many people I think still believe that somehow the Ukraine war will be over and we will go back to the world of pre the invasion and we won’t.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah, I wanted to ask you about that at some point I’ll ask you how you think things will get resolved in Ukraine. But assuming there is a good resolution from the perspective of the West and Ukraine, you have written that the stakes here are very significant for what the security of Europe will look like because you will at some point have Ukraine with the largest army and the most battle tested, battle ready army in Europe. What does that mean for European security and the balance of power?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

So I think this war has fundamentally changed Europe. And for as long as Vladimir Putin is in the Kremlin, and possibly even longer depending on who his successor is, this war is not in any meaningful sense going to be over. Because even if and when the fighting stops, and the fighting always does stop at some point, it will be effectively a frozen conflict because there won’t be a real willingness by the Russians to put this whole thing behind them. This is now framed by Putin as an existential battle with the West. He wants a world where Ukraine doesn’t exist and he has framed in his domestic propaganda, and Russia really is now a sort of fascist state, he has framed this very much in echoes of the Second World war as a kind of fight against what he calls the Nazis of Ukraine.

And the West does their supporters. And so even when the fighting stops, there will be a kind of frozen or a cold conflict. And the challenge will be, and I think there are sort of three challenges. One, what’s going on right now, is the West is providing Ukraine with the support to maximize its territorial gains. The Ukrainians talk about going back to the borders of 1991, which would of course include Crimea. Who knows if that’s possible. Well, before that, there’s a lot of land to still be regained in the south and the east. And what the next few months is going to be about is maximizing Ukrainian territorial regaining. And the more territory Ukraine gains, the more Ukraine is viable. So for example, regaining territory to the south to return its access to the Azov Sea will make it a much more viable country.

But at some point, simply because the pace at which weaponry is being used is just absolutely unsustainable, at some point the fighting will stop. And then I think the kind of analogy is probably more like Korea, after the Korean War, as you know better than I do, there was the armistice, but no sort of Versailles like peace treaty. It will be that kind of cessation of hostilities but not cessation of the underlying conflict. And then I think the question is what does Ukraine need in terms of weaponry and defense guarantees to deter another Russian invasion one, two, three, four years down the road. And that’s the kind of what military analysts call the porcupine strategy. How can it make it be helped to be so defended that it’s unattractive to attack? And that is partly defensive weaponry. I’m no military expert, but it’s where things like military jets come in, it’s where very serious defensive arsenal. And it’s also about security guarantees.

And that leads some people to say that’s membership of NATO, that’s the only serious security guarantee or it’s what you might call the Israelification of Ukraine. And by that there are, of course, lots of differences, lots of differences. But what I mean by that is bilateral security guarantees and a very, very serious commitment of weaponry. And all of that will mean, as you quoted me as saying, Ukraine will have a battle tested army, a lot of weaponry. It’ll be very reliant on the West and it’ll of course be very reliant on the West to help assist with the rebuilding that will then be essential to create the vibrant economy that will make it sustainable. And I’m no career expert, but if you look at Korea, South Korea was very, very, very poor after the end of the Korean War. And despite it being effectively a frozen conflict, it had an extraordinary development trajectory thereafter.

Preet Bharara:

What do you think the likelihood of Russia using nuclear weapons is at the moment? And can you see circumstances in which as the war continues to unfold, that likelihood goes up?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

So I’m not going to put a figure on it. My assessments are no better than anyone else’s.

Preet Bharara:

Hopefully, on this you will not say inevitable.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

It’s absolutely not that. People who know much, much more about this than I do. I often ask people that, and I sort of hear almost exclusively in single digits, some higher than lower. But nonetheless, frankly, anything in high single digits is-

Preet Bharara:

That’s very high.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

It’s very high. Exactly.

Preet Bharara:

Things in high single digits, those things happen all the time.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Exactly. So even if it’s very low single digits, I’d rather it was closer to zero. I would point to a few factors. One is that in the last year we’ve worried about this a lot and every increase in the supply of Western weaponry has come after a considerable debate about would this risk escalation, particularly in Germany. One of the reasons that Chancellor Schultz took weeks to decide that Germany would in fact supply Leopard tanks, which in the end of course, he only did after having persuaded or having got the agreement of President Biden to also commit in theory at least to sending some Abrams tanks. The whole German concern is about are we going to provoke escalation? We’ve had a year of evermore serious weaponry being sent to Ukraine, in dribs and drabs, but ever more seriously. And we haven’t had that nuclear escalation or anything close to it from the Russians. That’s point one.

Point two, one of the few things that the Chinese, who are clearly absolutely not giving up on their friendship with the Russians, have been pretty clear about is that they do not want to see nuclear weapons being used. And I think that the Russians, there would be real opprobrium from the global south, if you will, from the developing countries, many of whom have either been on Russia’s side or at least have refused to sign up to the West’s position on Ukraine. So that’s at risk for them.

But, and the one counter to this, I think the one area, territorial area, which I think is sort of particularly important for the right, I mean it’s all important for them, but particularly important is Crimea. And so there are some who say, “Well, if there’s ever going to be something that tips the Russians, it’s if there was a serious Ukrainian attack on Crimea.” And I don’t know. One of the most interesting books I’ve read in the last couple of years has been a book that was based on a long series of interviews done in I think in 2000s or maybe 1999 with Putin, and it’s kind of Putin in his own words.

And one of the stories he tells there, which you stop me if you’ve heard this, because I think it’s quite well known now. But he tells this story about when he was growing up in what was then Leningrad, in his apartment block. He and his friends used to play on the stairwell. And one time he was charging up and down there and he came across a rat and he cornered the rat. And he describes how the cornered rat at some point then flew for his neck. And he describes this and he makes the point that this taught him a life lesson of what happens when people are cornered. And it really struck me and I’m-

Preet Bharara:

What does that mean? Does that mean that he learned that that’s what you do if you’re cornered, you fly at the neck?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Yeah, yeah. And it makes you wonder. Makes me think that there might be, you know, could say, look, the last year has shown us that we should really just discount this concern about Russian escalation because it hasn’t happened. Again and again and again, the West has supplied more weaponry and there hasn’t been a Russian resort to anything extreme.

Preet Bharara:

Not yet.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Look, if you pushed me, I think that’s probably still the case. But I wouldn’t discount it entirely.

Preet Bharara:

Most of these conversations, it seems to me, revolve around the scenario in which Ukraine continues to do well and it’s done better than expectations and the rat analogy, what happens if Putin starts losing more and more badly? I wonder about the opposite scenario and maybe that’s not likely and I’m not a military expert either. But let’s just consider it for a moment and then we’ll talk about something else. Let’s say the war starts going better for Putin and Russia and they start taking more territory and the likelihood of Ukraine taking some territory back comes off the table and the Ukrainian army is besieged and things are just going poorly and they go more poorly. Then the debates in Germany and the US and elsewhere will be what? Is there a circumstance in which even though there’s this delicate balancing of what will provoke a response or an escalation if we give more weapons, is there a universe in which the west can tolerate a reversal in the war that’s so significant that it will start looking like Ukraine may lose?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

I think the answer is pretty clearly no. But I also don’t think that’s very likely. I really don’t think that’s likely because I think what we’ve seen a year on, and I think the Russians occupy just under 20% of Ukrainian territory. They have failed, abjectly failed, in their attempts to take Kyiv. They’ve failed in their attempt to completely cripple the country over the winter with their attacks on infrastructure, particularly on power infrastructure. They could not take the country and sort of hold it against the Ukrainians there, unless they reduced the entire country to rubble, in the way that Bakhmut has been reduced to rubble. There would be incredible and constant guerrilla and attacks from Ukrainians. And it’s impossible, even for the Russians to reduce the entire country to rubble I would say.

Just consider Bakhmut. They’ve been trying to take Bakhmut since last summer and they still haven’t. And tens of thousands of Russians have been sacrificed on the altar of just throwing bodies at this awful, awful sort of First World War style French warfare. I think that shows to me that the Russian military, it could take some more territory, but I don’t think it’s capable of succeeding in what is currently Putin’s stated goal, which is the elimination of what it sees as the western facing government of Ukraine. Its goal is still to get rid of that and I think that’s an impossibility. And I don’t think the West could allow that. And I just don’t think it could happen anyway, right now.

Look, I’m not going to rule anything out given where our conversation started, but that would be so catastrophic for Europe. It’s important. For Vladimir Putin, given the way he has framed this, this would not be the end. Then what about Moldova? What about the Baltics? It is, I think sometimes easy to see this just through the prism of Ukraine and it’s really not that in Russian eyes, or at least it’s not that in Vladimir Putin’s perception. I’m sure we can construct scenarios where there’s a sort of mass withdrawal and no support, but I find that very hard to conceive. And if it did, we should just be very conscious of what the consequences are.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. So I’m going to try not to worry about that, based on your advice.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Well. No, the bigger point is that I think that some of these conversations that are happening within the Republican Party or some of these positions that have been taken, that sort of come quite close to what’s our strategic interest here and who cares if that happens, fundamentally, I think misunderstand the stakes involved in this. And it’s not just some far off country of which they may care little.

Preet Bharara:

You have mentioned, if we can talk about it, a certain silver lining with respect to the war in Ukraine as it relates to climate. Can you elaborate on that?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Well, I think one of the things that it has done, it’s exposed Europe’s extraordinary reliance on Russia for gas in particular, but for gas and oil. And the result of a really dramatic determination to shift away from that has been an acceleration of investment in renewables and an acceleration of investment in liquid national gas facilities in Europe. Which means that it’s also, I mean let’s be clear, it’s also meant that some coal-fired power plants have stayed on longer or indeed been restarted. So there’s been some carbon belching in the short term. But in the longer term I think it’s really accelerated Europe’s transition, which needed to happen anyway and it’s made it much faster. And I had some colleagues who did some calculations and say that they think it’s accelerated, the green transition, by some 5 to 10 years.

Preet Bharara:

5 to 10 years?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Yeah, some elements of it. That kind of investment has been accelerated very dramatically. And that would be great. That is a small silver lining. It’s certainly had a sort of very fundamental impact on the nature of the global energy system. And I think on balance that it’s also sort of focused attention on natural gas, it’s focused attention on renewables, it’s focused attention on energy security. And actually, green energy, in the end, is more secure because it tends to be much more locally produced. It’s also, however, shown up many of the challenges in this energy transition, which where are we going to get the rare earths to power the batteries from. All of the supply chains and all of the indeed the supply constraints needed, all the permitting reform that’s going to be needed to build all the wind power and so forth.

So there’s a huge amount to be done. So I’m not being kind of Panglossian in any sense. And then of course the last bit is that the increase in energy prices in Europe has actually meant that Europeans have started using a bit less energy. So the GDP, the energy intensity of GDP has improved.

Preet Bharara:

So fair to say that including for the reasons you just mentioned and perhaps other reasons, you’re more optimistic about climate in this conversation than you would’ve been in May of 2020?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Yeah. Both for this, but even more so because of the Inflation Reduction Act, which has all the downsides that we’ve talked about, but it is a huge amount of money to accelerate the climate transition in the US. And it’s going to have a big impact, no doubt. There’s a great irony to it. The biggest recipients of the Inflation reduction Act money are going to be red states. So the politics of this is really interesting. But the states where there’s not so much focus on climate are going to be the biggest beneficiaries. I was just in Texas earlier this year, as you know, is absolutely booming. Booming, booming, booming. But it’s also the biggest renewable state.

Preet Bharara:

Yep. And a lot of businesses are moving there.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

A lot of businesses moving there.

Preet Bharara:

We have been talking a lot as is everybody and as has the economist about certain emerging technologies, I guess they’re not so emerging anymore, including ChatGPT. In three years time, how much of a difference in the world do you think some of these technologies will wreak on the planet?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

A lot when you say some of these technologies, I’m going to take that more broadly than just ChatGPT. But AI, of which ChatGPT and generative AI models are kind of the latest exciting incarnation, but I’ve no doubt that we are… You know when you see that curve of adoption of technology and yet sort of goes slowly and then suddenly shoots upwards. We’re probably at the beginnings of the shooting upwards, but we’re very much only at the beginning. So there’s lots and lots of things that are where these technologies are going to make a fundamental difference. I don’t think journalists are going to be out of business. I think there’s lots of opportunity for us and for all minor of other industries from the natural language models. But there’s all kinds of other areas too, which are going to be fundamentally affected.

So I’m basically, and we’ve talked about all of the… We’ve gone from Ukraine to China and so forth. There’s so many things and areas to be excited about because there’s so many incredible, whether you look at biosciences, whether you look at whether it’s longevity, whether it’s healthcare, all kinds of areas where we’re really seeing fundamental changes that will be transformative. So yes, there’ll be lots more changes. ChatGPT, it will have a big impact on lots of things, but I don’t think it’s going to be the most fundamental of these.

Preet Bharara:

Do you think there will be movements in various places responsibly, which is assuming a lot, but responsibly to regulate the use of AI and are democratic governments or other governments up to the task?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Gosh, that’s a very big question for the end. There will be movements for it and there will be some regulation, whether it will be in enough areas across the board to pass your test of, quote, unquote, up to the task. I don’t know. There’ll be things that we will fail to regulate well, and I hope we don’t regulate things so much that there isn’t innovation. It will be like every new technology. Some things you realize afterwards you needed to regulate more and you go back and you do that.

Preet Bharara:

Yeah. We have this problem right now with the internet when it was nascent. We didn’t regulate in various ways and we protected platforms from liability in certain ways. Section 230, which we talk about on the podcast from time to time, and there are good reasons for it. But at some point the decisions you make early on with respect to a transformative technology you have to live with, right?

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Yeah. And I hope you learn from the last set of decisions you made with a transformative technology and you don’t make the same mistakes twice. But I hope you also don’t think you don’t get too technophobic and think, “Oh my goodness, we have to regulate something out of existence.” It’s a tricky balance.

Preet Bharara:

Zanny Minton Beddoes, thanks so much for being back on the show. We’ll have you back soon, and it’ll be sooner than three years.

Zanny Minton Beddoes:

Thank you. Always good to talk to you.

Preet Bharara:

My conversation with Zanny Minton Beddoes continues from members of the Cafe Insider Community. To try out the membership for just $1 for a month, head to cafe.com/insider. Again, that’s cafe.com/insider.

THE BUTTON:

I want to end the show this week by celebrating the life of a person who’s often called the mother of the Disability Rights Movement. I’m talking about Judy Heumann, the relentless and revolutionary activist who died last week at the age of 75. When she was a toddler, Heumann became a quadriplegic after a bout with polio. This was Brooklyn in the late 1940s, a time and place where people with disabilities had little access to libraries, schools, and public transportation, and faced discrimination in education and employment. For Heumann, that reality was made clear at an early age. When she was five years old, her mother tried to enroll her at a local elementary school. “Judy was not allowed to be there,” said the principal. What was the reason he gave? Her wheelchair made her a fire hazard. It wasn’t long before Heumann was an outspoken activist and fighting for access in public schools became one of her first battles.

After graduating from college, Heumann applied to become a teacher in New York City Public Schools. But the Board of Education denied her a teaching license, citing paralysis of both lower extremities. Heumann sued the Board of Education and they eventually backed down. She became the first wheelchair user to teach in New York City. Perhaps her most high profile moment came in 1977 when she was just 29 years old and led what would become the longest non-violent occupation of a federal building in American history. Four years earlier, President Nixon had signed the Rehabilitation Act, which contained the first federal civil rights protections for people with disabilities. But officials had repeatedly delayed implementing the most important provision, Section 504. The law required making federal buildings across the country more accessible, which would be costly. So politicians were kicking the can down the road. And Joseph Califano Jr., the Secretary of Health Education and Welfare under President Carter, said he wanted even more time to study and examine the 504 regulations before authorizing them.

So disability rights activists occupied federal buildings around the country. Judy Heumann organized a group of more than 100 protestors in San Francisco and let a sit-in that would last for over three weeks. As the other demonstrations petered out, Heumann’s stayed strong. Nearly a month into the sit-in, Califano signed the 504 regulations. That fight paved the way for the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, the ADA, which prohibited discrimination against people with disabilities in all areas of American life, including public and private spaces. I spent a good amount of time enforcing the ADA when I was US Attorney. Heumann was relentless as an outside activist, holding government accountable. But she also understood that she could make a difference inside government. During the Clinton administration, she served as an assistant secretary in the Department of Education, and during the Obama administration, she served as a special advisor to the State Department.

She also mentored younger generations of activists, particularly women with disabilities. And she never stopped speaking out at rallies, on podcasts, in movies, on Capitol Hill. Everywhere she went, she stressed the disability is not inherently a tragedy, but rather a reflection of society’s restrictions. As she once put it, “Disability only becomes a tragedy when society fails to provide the things we need to lead our lives, job opportunities, or barrier-free buildings, for example. It is not a tragedy to me that I’m living in a wheelchair.”

If you want to learn more about Heumann’s life and work, check out the 2020 Netflix documentary Crip Camp. I highly recommend it. It traces the roots of the Disability Rights Movement to a small summer camp in Upstate New York where Heumann worked as a counselor in 1971. She was then just 23. And the film beautifully captures her smarts, courage and charisma. It’s now over 50 years later, and in that time, Judy Heumann changed the world. That’s quite a legacy to leave. Judy Heumann, rest in peace.

Well, that’s it for this episode of Stay Tuned. Thanks again to my guest, Zanny Minton Beddoes. If you like what we do, rate and review the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new listeners find the show. Send me your questions about news, politics, and justice. Tweet them to me at Preet Bharara with the hashtag AskPreet, or you can call and leave me a message at (669) 247-7338. That’s (669) 24-PREET. Or, you can send an email to letters@cafe.com. Stay Tuned is presented by Cafe and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The executive producer is Tamara Sepper. The technical director is David Tatasciore. The senior producers are Adam Waller and Matthew Billy. The Cafe team is David Kurlander, Sam Ozer-Staton, Noah Azali, Nat Wiener, Jake Kaplan, Namatasha and Claudia Hernandez. Our music is by Andrew Dost. I’m your host, Preet Bharara. Stay Tuned.