Podcasts about Thucydides

Dr. Patrick Baker is a translator, subtitler, and language consultant. Learn more about Patrick on his website. Perhaps peruse his robust academic CV. Per our conversation, Patrick invites you to explore: J.S. Bach's Art of the Fugue.  The compelling art of his brilliant wife, Katrin Grote-Baker.  The translation work of his distinguished neighbors, Heather Kimber and Nathan Fritz.  William Weaver, who is Patrick's North Star for translation. If you're reading Humberto Eco in English, you're also reading Weaver.  Hobbes' translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War.  Der Morgen der Welt: Geschichte der Renaissance by Bernd Roeck. Or, maybe better yet, wait for the forthcoming English translation! All for Nothing by Walter Kempowski, who died on the same day and at the same hospital where Patrick's daughter was born. One day Patrick might translate this.  Do you enjoy these explorations of working lives? Please support this project on Patreon. Check out my free weekly newsletter, The Sabbateur.  All my other projects are over here.  Get in touch on Insta, Twitter, Facebook, or at podcastforaliving [at] gmail.  Please hit that follow/subscribe button, leave a review, and share the pod with your people Special thanks to Liv Hunt for our logo design.  Our theme song is Nile's Blues by Kevin MacLeod, licensed under Creative Commons by an Attribution 4.0 License. Please take good care of yourself. Thank you for listening! ★ Support this podcast on Patreon ★

Peter Turchin has continued the work of Ibn Khaldun, by elaborating upon Khaldun's hypotheses and testing them against the wealth of historical data that we now possess. By means of a structural demographic analysis of historical empires, Turchin has worked for years to generate mathematical models in order to explain the trends that seem to recur in every complex society. Now, with the data of 10,000 years of human activity on the group level, it may be possible to finally move beyond the preliminary, pseudo-scientific steps of the discipline of history, and proceed into a truly mathematized phase. This is the discipline that Turchin calls "Cliodynamics", after the Muse of history of Ancient Greece. His intention to leave behind the anthropological and archaeological studies that characterized history in the past, and bring mathematics into the field so that we can begin to make predictions. The reason why many have been so resistant to this development is our belief in free will, and the unpredictability of human action. Turchin thinks that this is a mistake, because while individual decisions are often unpredictable at the individual, granular level, at the level of entire populations or demographics, human beings become rather predictable. Quite in line with the cyclical view of history postulated by Plato, Thucydides, or Nietzsche, Turchin brings the math to demonstrate the truth of their ideas: that, in the realm of human history, all returns eternally. For our sources today, we're primarily using Turchin's books: War and Peace and War, Ultrasociety, and a brief dip at the end into the overall idea of Ages of Discord, as well as some references to Secular Cycles by Turchin and Nefedov. We'll also include a number of quotes from Roman historians Livy, Plutarch and others, as we examine the period of the Roman Republic, the chaos of the Late Republic and the transition to the Principate, as explained by Turchin's structural-demographic theory. This should be fun, given that we've already considered these events somewhat through the eyes of Machiavelli. Now, we can approach the subject with more rigor. In my view, Turchin is following in the traditions of these thinkers, but developing their work further. Episode art is Thomas Cole's now famous "Destruction" piece of his cycle, "The Course of Empire".

χαίρετε! Here is the third episode of our new season, continuing with our run on Thucydides, this time analysing the Melian dialogue (5.84-116): http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.01.0199%3Abook%3D5%3Achapter%3D84 We have also produced a simplified version of the first part of the dialogue that you could use to accompany the episode if you wish: https://www.patreon.com/posts/thucydides-text-75306327 εὐωχεῖσθε τοῦ ἐπεισοδίου! Josep & Leigh. Support the podcast and get access to episodes in advance: https://www.patreon.com/Hellenizdein?fan_landing=true&view_as=public Follow us οn Twitter: https://twitter.com/ancientgreekpod Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/604916774052809 Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ancientgreekpodcast/ Write to us personally at: theancientgreekpodcast@gmail.com

Invitée : Marie Robin, chercheuse postdoctorante au centre Thucydide de l'Université Panthéon-Assas. La série sur Netflix : https://www.netflix.com/fr/title/80240005 La série d'articles de David Thomson sur "Les Jours" : https://lesjours.fr/obsessions/les-revenants-bilel/ ; qui a donné lieu à la parution de l'ouvrage "Les Revenants" (Seuil-les Jours, Prix Albert Londres 2017).

Sean sits down with Pedro Do Amaral in this episode to discuss all things diet and health related. Talking about their respective academic backgrounds and in discussing ongoing research, Sean and Pedro unpackage their views on seed oils, the vertical diet, elimination diets, and challenging the popular "If it fits your Macros" perspective that has become popularized in the recent decades. 

χαίρετε! Here is our latest episode continuing our run of episodes on Thucydides. This time we look into a short section (1.20-22), where he explains his methodology and how it differs from previous historians. Here are some short passages that we quote, paraphrase and discuss: οἱ γὰρ ἄνθρωποι τὰς ἀκοὰς τῶν προγεγενημένων, καὶ ἢν ἐπιχώρια σφίσιν ᾖ, ὁμοίως ἀβασανίστως παρ᾽ ἀλλήλων δέχονται. οὕτως ἀταλαίπωρος τοῖς πολλοῖς ἡ ζήτησις τῆς ἀληθείας, καὶ ἐπὶ τὰ ἑτοῖμα μᾶλλον τρέπονται. καὶ ἐς μὲν ἀκρόασιν ἴσως τὸ μὴ μυθῶδες αὐτῶν ἀτερπέστερον φανεῖται: ὅσοι δὲ βουλήσονται τῶν τε γενομένων τὸ σαφὲς σκοπεῖν καὶ τῶν μελλόντων ποτὲ αὖθις κατὰ τὸ ἀνθρώπινον τοιούτων καὶ παραπλησίων ἔσεσθαι, ὠφέλιμα κρίνειν αὐτὰ ἀρκούντως ἕξει. κτῆμά τε ἐς αἰεὶ μᾶλλον ἢ ἀγώνισμα ἐς τὸ παραχρῆμα ἀκούειν ξύγκειται. Thanks for listening! Leigh & Josep Support the podcast and get access to episodes in advance: https://www.patreon.com/Hellenizdein?fan_landing=true&view_as=public Follow us ον Twitter: https://twitter.com/ancientgreekpod Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/604916774052809 Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ancientgreekpodcast/ Write to us personally at: theancientgreekpodcast@gmail.com

For more than one hundred years there were three recognized domains in military conflict: land, maritime and air. In the two last decades after significant debate, the cyber and space domains were officially defined by western allies. Rob Farley is in the studio with podcast editor Ron Granieri to explain why the United States and its allies need to consider adding the finance domain to the multi-domain discussion. Not to be confused with the economic lever of power in DIME, Rob makes the argument that the finance domain involves the technologies of finance and money that countries use to either maximize their own resource base or interfere in other states' abilities to maximize their resources. As with all discussions at the War College, he begins with Thucydides and moves forward in time examining the British pound, the U.S. dollar, the gold standard and looking forward at cryptocurrency and digital currency.

Stream my new song on CvltNation: https://cvltnation.com/experience-the-doomy-grunge-melodies-of-slumbering-sun-dream-snake/ This episode gets us back into reading Nietzsche, and here I think our prolonged focus on influences and previous thinkers will bear fruit. We're picking back up with Nietzsche's middle period, starting from his work in Human, All Too Human. In a chapter from this work, Nietzsche addresses himself to the ideas of Rousseau, Machiavelli, Thucydides, and Plato. He attacks democracy and egalitarianism, but treats them ambivalently, as a resistless force that cannot be stopped and with which the free spirit must make his peace. He treats war as essential for mankind, but acknowledges the ways in which a European peace would advance civilization. Above all, he rejects the Kantian notions that free expression of all would improve society, and equally so rejects the Rousseauian notions of abandoning the Enlightenment advances in art and culture. While this chapter lays the groundwork for Nietzsche's later politics, it is a fascinating time of experimentation that is difficult to contextualize without seeing the entire picture of his development. Join me this week for A Glance at The State.

χαίρετε! Welcome back! Here is the 1st episode of season 3, starting off with a run of three episodes on Thucydides. Τhis one acts as a general introduction to the man and his work. This season the podcast will come out fortnightly on Friday evenings, so you can expect episode 42 on the 3rd of February at 8pm (Spanish time). Nonetheless, this season's episodes are already available on our Patreon page: https://www.patreon.com/Hellenizdein εὐωχεῖθε! Josep & Leigh p.s. I'm experimenting with a restored Attic pronunciation in this episode, instead of the usual standardised Erasmian, and am not too sure about the results. It may take a bit of getting used to! Follow us οn Twitter: https://twitter.com/ancientgreekpod Join our Facebook group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/604916774052809 Follow us on instagram: https://www.instagram.com/ancientgreekpodcast/ Write to us personally at: theancientgreekpodcast@gmail.com

Roman Parallel - Marius (157-86 BC)Important PeopleDemetrius (337-283) - Neighbor and even, for a time, brother-in-law. Son of Antigonus I and father of Antigonus II, Demetrius rules in Greece, Macedon (for seven years), Asia Minor but was ultimately conquered by Seleucus and imprisoned until he died of his own drinking habit.Cassander (355-297) - Son of Antipater, who had served as regent of Macedon during Alexander's campaigns and later served as regent after the death of Perdiccas, he did not inherit the Macedonian throne from his father but had to fight Polyperchon for it. He conquers Greece as well and, most infamously, ends the charade of the successors serving as satraps to a regent by killing the young Alexander IV and his mother and grandmother, Olympias.Ptolemy I Soter (367-282) - The stable successor to Alexander who carves out Egypt (305 BC) for himself and founds a dynasty that rules Egypt from the prosperous port of Alexandria until Julius Caesar's arrival. Ptolemy also strategic in his dynastic alliances to stave off further wars.Cineas - Philosopher and orator, Cineas acts as a foil to Pyrrhus's reckless moving from hope to hope. In the midpoint of this life, he attempts to help Pyrrhus think through why he should be driven from conquest to conquest and provides reflection on Pyrrhus's accomplishments. Nevertheless, the philosopher accompanies him on all Pyrrhus's expeditions.Fabricius - Our first direct encounters with Roman virtue. While not given his own biography, Fabricius looms large in contrast to Pyrrhus's vices. Fabricius is stable, cautious, and dependable where Pyrrhus is reckless, overly optimistic, and flighty.Important PlacesEpirus - Pyrrhus's birthplace and kingdom by right, inheritance, and conquest.Macedon - Neighboring kingdom to Epirus. Pyrrhus manages to win it and lose it without a fight. Rome - The new power in the Western Mediterranean, having risen even more recently than Carthage, now threatens the entire Italian peninsula, including the Greek-speaking colonies in the south. Tarentum - The colony that asks Pyrrhus for help, and then quickly comes to regret asking. Beneventum - The battle in which the Romans manage, not exactly to beat Pyrrhus, but to convince him that Italy won't be worth the fight. Key Vices and VirtuesExcessive Appetite for Conquest (πλεονεξία) - Not a vice in the Aristotelian canon, but one important to historians like Thucydides, who saw it as the root of the Athenian downfall. This Life becomes a meditation on knowign one's political limits and serving in the capacity one has been placed. The philosopher Cineas provides some of this perspective for us without being too heavy-handed.Justice - Once again ignored by most of Alexander's successors, we do se key aspects of it lived up to by the Romans. It is called the virtue of kings in this life and one philosopher observes that the Roman Senate strikes him as “An Assembly of Kings.” When Justice and Power are joined, Plutarch sees not only a properous state nor even just a stable situation, but a good government promoting virtue in its people. This life sets us up so well to enter into the Roman story, because Plutarch wants to remind even the Romans of their past virtues and encourage them to live up to those old virtues in the height of their power.Support the show

On this special episode of the Energy Security Cubed Podcast, Kelly Ogle and Joe Calnan discuss major events in global and Canadian energy security in 2022, and what to watch for into the future. Guest Bios: - Joe Calnan is a Fellow and Energy Security Forum Manager at the Canadian Global Affairs Institute Host Bio: - Kelly Ogle (host): President and CEO of the Canadian Global Affairs Institute (www.cgai.ca/staff#Ogle) Clip Guest Bios (in order of appearance) - Thierry Bros is a Professor at Sciences Po Paris, find him on Twitter at @thierry_bros - Roy Norton is a CGAI Fellow and an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the University of Waterloo - Greg Brew is a CGAI Fellow and Henry A. Kissinger Postdoctoral Fellow at International Security Studies and the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University, find him on Twitter at @gbrew24 - Dale Naly is the former Associate Minister of Natural Gas and the current Minister of Service Alberta and Red Tape Reduction in the Government of Alberta - Kathryn Porter is the founder of energy research firm Watt-Logic, find Watt-Logic at watt-logic.com - Swaran Singh is a CGAI Fellow and Professor and Former Chair of the Centre for International Politics Organisation and Disarmament in the School of International Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University What is Joe reading? 1. History of the Peloponnesian War, by Thucydides: https://www.amazon.ca/History-Peloponnesian-War-Thucydides/dp/0140440399 2. The Iliad, by Homer: https://www.amazon.ca/Iliad-Homer/dp/0140445927 3. Political Order and Political Decay: From the Industrial Revolution to the Globalization of Democracy, by Francis Fukuyama: https://www.amazon.ca/Political-Order-Decay-Industrial-Globalization/dp/1491584874 4. Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy, by Joseph Schumpeter: https://www.amazon.ca/Capitalism-Socialism-Democracy-Joseph-Schumpeter/dp/0061561614 What is Kelly reading? 1. From Left to Right: Saskatchewan's Political and Economic Transformation, by Dale Eisler: https://www.amazon.ca/Left-Right-Saskatchewans-Political-Transformation-ebook/dp/B09XJHM6M6 2. Revival and Change: The 1957 and 1958 Diefenbaker Elections, by John C. Courtney: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Revival-Change-Diefenbaker-Elections-Turning/dp/0774866640 3. Personality and Power: Builders and Destroyers of Modern Europe, by Ian Kershaw: https://www.amazon.com/Personality-Power-Builders-Destroyers-Modern/dp/1594203458 4. Ice War Diplomat: Hockey Meets Cold War Politics at the 1972 Summit Series, by Gary J. Smith: https://www.amazon.ca/Ice-War-Diplomat-Behind-Scenes/dp/1771623179 Recording Date: January 3, 2023 Energy Security Cubed is part of the CGAI Podcast Network. Follow the Canadian Global Affairs Institute on Facebook, Twitter (@CAGlobalAffairs), or on LinkedIn. Head over to our website at www.cgai.ca for more commentary. Produced by Joseph Calnan. Music credits to Drew Phillips.

Danny and Derek welcome Jonathan Kirshner, professor of political science and international studies at Boston College, to discuss his book An Unwritten Future: Realism and Uncertainty in World Politics. They touch on structural realism/neorealism, the importance of classical realism, Mearsheimer, Thucydides, and more. *Producer's note: Due to a technical error, we unfortunately do not have audio for the beginning of this conversation, so the discussion picks up about 15 minutes in.Grab up a copy of Jonathan's book! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.americanprestigepod.com/subscribe

REDIFF - La Chine peut-elle devenir le maître du monde ? La question ne cesse de revenir. Dans Vers la guerre : la Chine et l'Amérique dans le piège de Thucydide ?, Graham Allison explique que dans l'Histoire, de façon régulière, un combat se déroule entre deux puissances : une puissance dominante - mais déclinante - et une autre, en croissance, amenée à prendre la place. Pour étayer son analyse, Graham Allison s'appuie sur la rivalité entre Spartes et Athènes. Il estime qu'aujourd'hui cette rivalité est entre les États-Unis et la Chine. "Hors-série Lenglet & Co", un podcast hebdomadaire présenté par François Lenglet et Sylvain Zimmermann, qui vous donne les clés pour tout comprendre des évolutions et des mutations économiques, en Europe et dans le monde.

“The years, of which I have spoken to you, when I pursued the inner images, were the most important time of my life. Everything else is to be derived from this. It began at that time, and the later details hardly matter anymore. My entire life consisted in elaborating what had burst forth from the unconscious and flooded me like an enigmatic stream and threatened to break me. That was the stuff and material for more than only one life. Everything later was merely the outer classification, the scientific elaboration, and the integration into life. But the numinous beginning, which contained everything, was then.”   ― C.G. Jung, preface for The Red Book: Liber Novus   James Hillman: I was reading about this practice that the ancient Egyptians had of opening the mouth of the dead. It was a ritual and I think we don't do that with our hands. But opening the Red Book seems to be opening the mouth of the dead.   Sonu Shamdasani: It takes blood. That's what it takes. The work is Jung's `Book of the Dead.' His descent into the underworld, in which there's an attempt to find the way of relating to the dead. He comes to the realization that unless we come to terms with the dead we simply cannot live, and that our life is dependent on finding answers to their unanswered questions. Lament for the Dead, Psychology after Jung's Red Book (2013) Pg. 1     Begun in 1914, Swiss psychologist Carl Jung's The Red Book lay dormant for almost 100 years before its eventual publication. Opinions are divided on whether Jung would have published the book if he had lived longer. He did send drafts to publishers early in life but seemed in no hurry to publish the book despite his advancing age. Regardless, it was of enormous importance to the psychologist, being shown to only a few confidants and family members. More importantly, the process of writing The Red Book was one of the most formative periods of Jung's life. In the time that Jung worked on the book he came into direct experience with the forces of the deep mind and collective unconscious. For the remainder of his career he would use the experience to build concepts and theories about the unconscious and repressed parts of the human mind.  In the broadest sense, Jungian psychology has two goals.    Integrate and understand the deepest and most repressed parts of the the human mind    and    Don't let them eat you alive in the process.    Jungian psychology is about excavating the most repressed parts of self and learning to hold them so that we can know exactly who and what we are. Jung called this process individuation. Jungian psychology is not, and should not be understood as, an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt to build a psychological container for the forces of the unconscious. While not a religion, it served a similar function as a religion. Jungian psychology serves as both a protective buffer and a lens to understand and clarify the self. Jung described his psychology as a bridge to religion. His hope was that it could help psychology understand the functions of the human need for religion, mythology and the transcendental. Jung hoped that his psychology could make religion occupy a healthier, more mindful place in our culture by making the function of religion within humanity more conscious.    Jung did not dislike religion. He viewed it as problematic when the symbols of religion became concretized and people took them literally. Jungian psychology itself has roots in Hindu religious traditions. Jung often recommended that patients of lapsed faith return to their religions of origin. He has case studies encouraging patients to resume Christian or Muslim religious practices as a source of healing and integration. Jung did have a caveat though. He recommended that patients return to their traditions with an open mind. Instead of viewing the religious traditions and prescriptive lists of rules or literal truths he asked patients to view them as metaphors for self discovery and processes for introspection. Jung saw no reason to make religious patients question their faith. He did see the need for patients who had abandoned religion to re-examine its purpose and function.    The process of writing The Red Book was itself a religious experience for Jung. He realized after his falling out from Freud, that his own religious tradition and the available psychological framework was not enough to help him contain the raw and wuthering forces of his own unconscious that were assailing him at the time. Some scholars believe Jung was partially psychotic while writing The Red Book, others claim he was in a state of partial dissociation or simply use Jung's term “active imagination”.    The psychotic is drowning while the artist is swimming. The waters both inhabit, however, are the same. Written in a similar voice to the King James Bible, The Red Book has a religious and transcendent quality. It is written on vellum in heavy calligraphy with gorgeous hand illuminated script. Jung took inspiration for mystical and alchemical texts for its full page illustrations.   It is easier to define The Red Book by what it is not than by what it is. According to Jung, it is not a work of art. It is not a scholarly psychological endeavor. It is also not an attempt to create a religion. It was an attempt for Jung to heal himself in a time of pain and save himself from madness by giving voice to the forces underneath his partial psychotic episode. The Red Book was a kind of container to help Jung witness the forces of the deep unconscious. In the same way, religion and Jungian psychology are containers for the ancient unconscious forces in the vast ocean under the human psyche.     Lament of the Dead, Psychology after Carl Jung's The Red Book is a dialogue between ex Jungian analyst James Hillman and Jungian scholar Sonu Shamdasani about the implications the Red Book has for Jungian psychology. Like the Red Book it was controversial when it was released.    James Hillman was an early protege of Jung who later became a loud critic of parts of Jung's psychology. Hillman wanted to create an “archetypal” psychology that would allow patients to directly experience and not merely analyze the psyche. His new psychology never really came together coherently and he never found the technique to validate his instinct. Hillman had been out of the Jungian fold for almost 30 years before he returned as a self appointed expert advisor during the publication of The Red Book. Hillman's interest in The Red Book was enough to make him swallow his pride, and many previous statements, to join the Jungians once again. It is likely that the archetypal psychology he was trying to create is what The Red Book itself was describing.    Sonu Shamdasani is not a psychologist but a scholar of the history of psychology. His insights have the detachment of the theoretical where Hillman's are more felt and more intuitive but also more personal. One gets the sense in the book that Hillman is marveling painfully at an experience that he had been hungry for for a long time. The Red Book seems to help him clarify the disorganized blueprints of his stillborn psychological model. While there is a pain in Hillman's words there is also a peace that was rare to hear from such a flamboyant and unsettled psychologist.    Sonu Shamdasani is the perfect living dialogue partner for Hillman to have in the talks that make up Lament. Shamdasani has one of the best BS detectors of maybe any Jungian save David Tacey. Shamdasani has deftly avoided the fads, misappropriations and superficialization that have plagued the Jungian school for decades. As editor of the Red Book he knows more about the history and assembly of the text than any person save for Jung. Not only is he also one of the foremost living experts on Jung, but as a scholar he does not threaten the famously egotistical Hillman as a competing interpreting psychologist. The skin that Shamdasani has in this game is as an academic while Hillman gets to play the prophet and hero of the new psychology they describe without threat or competition.    Presumedly these talks were recorded as research for a collaborative book to be co authored by the two friends and the death of Hillman in 2011 made the publication as a dialogue in 2013 a necessity. If that is not the case the format of a dialogue makes little sense. If that is the case it gives the book itself an almost mystical quality and elevates the conversation more to the spirit of a philosophical dialogue.    We are only able to hear these men talk to each other and not to us. There is a deep reverberation between the resonant implications these men are seeing The Red Book have for modern psychology. However, they do not explain their insights to the reader and their understandings can only be glimpsed intuitively. Like the briefcase in the film Pulp Fiction the audience sees the object through its indirect effect on the characters. We see the foggy outlines of the ethics that these men hope will guide modern psychology but we are not quite able to see it as they see it. We have only an approximation through the context of their lives and their interpretation of Jung's private diary. This enriches a text that is ultimately about the limitations of understanding.   One of the biggest criticisms of the book when it was published was that the terms the speaker used are never defined and thus the book's thesis is never objectivised or clarified. While this is true if you are an English professor, the mystic and the therapist in me see these limitations as the book's strengths. The philosophical dialectic turns the conversation into an extended metaphor that indirectly supports the themes of the text. The medium enriches the message. Much like a socratic dialogue or a film script the the authors act more as characters and archetypes than essayists. The prophet and the scholar describe their function and limitations as gatekeepers of the spiritual experience.    Reading the Lament, much like reading The Red Book, one gets the sense that one is witnessing a private but important moment in time. It is a moment that is not our moment and is only partially comprehensible to anyone but the author(s). Normally that would be a weakness but here it becomes a strength. Where normally the reader feels that a book is for them, here we feel that we are eavesdropping through a keyhole or from a phone line downstairs. The effect is superficially frustrating but also gives Lament a subtle quality to its spirituality that The Red Book lacks.     Many of the obvious elements for a discussion of the enormous Red Book are completely ignored in the dialogue. Hillman and Shamdasani's main takeaway is that The Red Book is about “the dead”. What they mean by “the dead” is never explained directly. This was a major sticking point for other reviewers, but I think their point works better undefined. They talk about the dead as a numinous term. Perhaps they are speaking about the reality of death itself. Perhaps about the dead of history. Perhaps they are describing the impenetrable veil we can see others enter but never see past ourselves. Maybe the concept contains all of these elements. Hillman, who was 82 at the time of having the conversations in Lament, may have been using The Red Book and his dialogue with Shamdasani to come to terms with his feelings about his own impending death.    Perhaps it is undefined because these men are feeling something or intuitively, seeing something that the living lack the intellectual language for. It is not that the authors do not know what they are talking about. They know, but they are not able to completely say it.  Hillman was such an infuriatingly intuitive person that his biggest downfall in his other books is that he often felt truths that he could not articulate. Instead he retreated into arguing the merits of his credentials and background or into intellectual archival of his opinions on philosophers and artists. In other works this led to a didactic and self righteous tone that his writing is largely worse for. In Lament Hillman is forced to talk off the cuff and that limitation puts him at his best as a thinker.    In his review of Lament, David Tacey has made the very good point that Jung abandoned the direction that The Red Book was taking him in. Jung saw it as a dead end for experiential psychology and retreated back into analytical inventorying of “archetypes”. On the publication of The Red Book, Jungians celebrate the book as the “culmination” of Jungian thought when instead it was merely a part of its origins. The Red Book represents a proto-Jungian psychology as Jung attempted to discover techniques for integration. Hillman and Shamdasani probe the psychology's origins for hints of its future in Lament.   HIllman and Shamdasani's thesis is partially a question about ethics and partially a question about cosmology. Are there any universal directions for living and behaving that Jungian psychology compels us towards (ethics)? Is there an external worldview that the, notoriously phenomenological, nature of Jungian psychology might imply (cosmology)? These are the major questions Hillman and Shamdasani confront in Lament.Their answer is not an answer as much as it is a question for the psychologists of the future.    Their conclusion is that “the dead'' of our families, society, and human history foist their unlived life upon us. It is up to us, and our therapists, to help us deal with the burden of “the dead”. It is not us that live, but the dead that live through us. Hillman quotes W.H. Auden several times:   We are lived through powers that we pretend to understand.  - W.H. Auden   A major tenant of Jungian psychology is that adult children struggle under the unlived life of the parent. The Jungian analyst helps the patient acknowledge and integrate all of the forces of the psyche that the parent ran from, so they are not passed down to future generations. A passive implication of the ethics and the cosmology laid out in Lament, is that to have a future we must reckon with not only the unlived life of the parent but also the unlived life of all the dead.    It is our job as the living to answer the questions and face the contradictions our humanity posits in order to discover what we really are. The half truths and outright lies from the past masquerade as tradition for traditions sake, literalized religion, and unconscious tribal identity must be overthrown. The weight of the dead of history can remain immovable if we try to merely discard it but drowns us if we cling to it too tightly. We need to use our history and traditions to give us a container to reckon with the future. The container must remain flexible if we are to grow into our humanity as a society and an aware people.    If you find yourself saying “Yes, but what does “the dead” mean!”  Then this book is not for you. If you find yourself confused but humbled by this thesis then perhaps it is. Instead of a further explanation of the ethical and cosmological future for psychology that his book posits I will give you a tangible example about how its message was liberatory for me.    Hillman introduces the concepts of the book with his explanation of Jung's reaction to the theologian and missionary Albert Schweitzer. Jung hated Schweitzer.  He hated him because he had descended into Africa and “gone native”. In Jung's mind Schweitzer had “refused the call”  to do anything  and “brought nothing home”. Surely the Africans that were fed and clothed felt they had been benefited! Was Jung's ethics informed by racism, cluelessness, arrogance or some other unknown myopism? A clue might be found in Jung's reaction to modern art exploring the unconscious or in his relationship with Hinduism. Jung took the broad strokes of his psychology from the fundamentals of the brahman/atman and dharma/moksha dichotomies of Hinduism. Jung also despised the practice of eastern mysticism practices by westerners but admired it in Easterners. Why? His psychology stole something theoretical that his ethics disallowed in direct practice.    Jung's views on contemporary (modern) artists of his time were similar. He did not want to look at depictions of the raw elements of the unconscious. In his mind discarding all the lessons of classicism was a “cop out”.  He viewed artists that descended into the abstract with no path back or acknowledgement of the history that gave them that path as failures. He wanted artists to make the descent into the subjective world and return with a torch of it's fire but not be consumed by it blaze. Depicting the direct experience of the unconscious was the mark of a failed artist to Jung. To Jung the destination was the point, not the journey. The only thing that mattered is what you were able to bring back from the world of the dead. He had managed to contain these things in The Red Book, why couldn't they? The Red Book was Jung's golden bough.    Jung took steps to keep the art in The Red Book both outside of the modernist tradition and beyond the historical tradition. The Red Book uses a partially medieval format but Jung both celebrates and overcomes the constraints of his chosen style. The Red Book was not modern or historical, it was Jung's experience of both. In Lament, Hillman describes this as the ethics that should inform modern psychology. Life should become ones own but part of ones self ownership is that we take responsibility for driving a tradition forward not a slave to repeating it.   Oddly enough the idea of descent and return will already be familiar to many Americans through the work of Joseph Campbell. Campbell took the same ethics of descent and return to the unconscious as the model of his “monomyth” model of storytelling. This briefly influenced psychology and comparative religion in the US and had major impact on screenwriters to this day. Campbells ethics are the same as Jung's. If one becomes stuck on the monomyth wheel, or the journey of the descent and return, one is no longer the protagonist and becomes an antagonist.  Campbell, and American post jungians in general were not alway great attributing influences and credit where it was due.    Jung was suspicious of the new age theosophists and psychadelic psychonauts that became enamored with the structure of the unconscious for the unconscious sake. Where Lament shines is when Hillman explains the ethics behind Jung's thinking. Jung lightly implied this ethics but was, as Hillman points out, probably not entirely conscious of it. One of Lament's biggest strengths and weaknesses is that it sees through the misappropriations of Jungian psychology over the last hundred years. Both of the dialogue's figures know the man of Jung so well that they do not need to address how he was misperceived by the public. They also know the limitations of the knowable.    This is another lesson that is discussed in Lament. Can modern psychology know what it can't know? That is my biggest complaint with the profession as it currently exists. Modern psychology seems content to retreat into research and objectivism. The medical, corporate, credentialist and academic restructuring of psychology in the nineteen eighties certainly furthered that problem. Jung did not believe that the descent into the unconscious without any hope of return was a path forward for psychology. This is why he abandoned the path The Red Book led him down. Can psychology let go of the objective and the researchable enough to embrace the limits of the knowable? Can we come to terms with limitations enough to heal an ego inflated world that sees no limits to growth?   I don't know but I sincerely hope so.    I said that I would provide a tangible example of the application of this book in it's review,  so here it is:   I have always been enamored with James Hillman. He was by all accounts a brilliant analyst. He also was an incredibly intelligent person. That intellect did not save him. Hillman ended his career as a crank and a failure in my mind. In this book you see Hillman contemplate that failure. You also see Hillman attempt to redeem himself as he glimpses the unglimpseable. He sees something in the Red Book that he allows to clarify his earlier attempt to revision psychology.    Hillman's attempt to reinvent Jungian psychology as archetypal psychology was wildly derided. Largely, because it never found any language or technique for application and practice. Hillman himself admitted that he did not know how to practice archetypal psychology. It's easy to laugh at somebody who claims to have reinvented psychology and can't even tell you what you do with their revolutionary invention.   However, I will admit that I think Hillman was right. He knew that he was but he didnt know how he was right. It is a mark of arrogance to see yourself as correct without evidence. Hillman was often arrogant but I think here he was not. Many Jungian analysts would leave the Jungian institutes through the 70, 80s and 90s to start somatic and experiential psychology that used Jung as a map but the connection between the body and the brain as a technique. These models made room for a direct experience in psychology that Jungian analysis does not often do. It added an element that Jung himself had practiced in the writing of The Red Book. Hillman never found this technique but he was correct about the path he saw forward for psychology. He knew what was missing.    I started Taproot Therapy Collective because I felt a calling to dig up the Jungian techniques of my parent's generation and reify them. I saw those as the most viable map towards the future of psychology, even though American psychology had largely forgotten them. I also saw them devoid of a practical technique or application for a world where years of analysis cost more than most trauma patients will make in a lifetime. I feel that experiential and brain based medicine techniques like brainspotting are the future of the profession.    Pathways like brainspotting, sensorimotor therapy, somatic experiencing, neurostimulation, ketamine, psilocybin or any technique that allows the direct experience of the subcortical brain is the path forward to treat trauma. These things will be at odds with the medicalized, corporate, and credentialized nature of healthcare. I knew that this would be a poorly understood path that few people, even the well intentioned, could see. I would never have found it if I had refused the call of “the dead”.    Lament is relevant because none of those realizations is somewhere that I ever would have gotten without the tradition that I am standing on top of. I am as, Isaac Newton said, standing on the shoulders of giants. Except Isaac Newton didn't invent that phrase. It was associated with him but he was standing on the tradition of the dead to utter a phrase first recorded in the medieval period. The author of its origin is unknown because they are, well, dead. They have no one to give their eulogy.    The ethics and the cosmology of Lament, is that our lives are meant to be a eulogy for our dead. Lament, makes every honest eulogy in history become an ethics and by extension a cosmology. Read Pericles eulogy from the Peloponesian war in Thucydides. How much of these lessons are still unlearned? I would feel disingenuous in my career unless I tell you who those giants are that I stand on. They are David Tacey, John Beebe, Sonu Shamdasani, Carl Jung, Fritz Perls, Karen Horney, and Hal Stone. Many others also.   I would never have heard the voice of James Hillman inside myself unless I had learned to listen to the dead from his voice beyond the grave. It would have been easy for me to merely critize his failures instead of seeing them as incomplete truths. Hillman died with many things incomplete, as we all inevitably will. Lament helped me clarify the voices that I was hearing in the profession. Lament of the Dead is a fascinating read not because it tells us exactly what to do with the dead, or even what they are. Lament is fascinating because it helps us to see a mindful path forward between innovation and tradition.    The contents of the collective unconscious cannot be contained by one individual. Just as Jungian psychology is meant to be a container to help an individual integrate the forces of the collective unconscious, attention to the unlived life of the historical dead can be a kind of container for culture. Similarly to Jungian psychology the container is not meant to be literalized or turned into a prison. It is a lens and a buffer to protect us until we are ready and allow us to see ourselves more clearly once we are. Our project is to go further in the journey of knowing ourselves where our ancestors failed to. Our mindful life is the product of the unlived life of the dead; it is the work of our life that is their lament.   

Last month, we heard from academic Joel Schlosser on Herodotus, inspired by my own blog on some excerpts. Now, a nice Redditor, Georgios, from Greece who's read all of Thucydides agreed to discuss the ancient historian with me. We wander close to Thucydides and far afield, but most of all his enthusiasm, enjoyment and sense of humor about the principal characters and events from these old battles and political intrigues made our chat sparkle. Interested in slowly reading ancient works with Georgios? Check out his Aristotle Study Group here.

Watch our livestream tomorrow (12/7/22), at 9:00 PM central time, on this channel: https://www.youtube.com/@StudioERecording Show flyer: https://www.instagram.com/p/ClzsytPMNrg/ Today we summarize the ways in which Nietzsche's politics was influenced by the Ancient Greeks. Nietzsche derives from the Sophists, such as Thucydides, his preference for realism over idealism in geopolitics, and the "practical justice" of examining every viewpoint on its own terms, and according to what would serve the advantage or disadvantage to that perspective. From Epicurus, he derives the "anti-politics" of praising withdrawal from the world, and the intellectual or philosophical class acting based on a pathos of distance in which they remove themselves from mass politics and from quotidian concerns. Finally, he inherits from figures such as Theognis a desire to way a cultural battle against democratic or egalitarian values. Rather than becoming political in terms of practical political action in his own time, Nietzsche sets his sights to the long-term, beyond any one regime, country, or people, and attempts to provide a timeless argument for hierarchy and aristocracy. This is "Nietzsche's Contest" in the philosophical arena: the war for his ideals, which he feels to be the most powerful, most life-enhancing, and thus most deserving in the political sphere, to triumph over the zeitgeist of democratic moralism. Our main sources today are the fragment, "The Greek State", and the essay, "Homer's Contest". This will serve as a kind of recap and conclusion to our focus on the Greeks, bringing an end to this antiquarian section of the season. Next week will serve as a bridge into the political concerns of the Enlightenment, by examining the ways in which one author of Enlightenment Europe, dear to Nietzsche, was influenced greatly by the political history of Rome. Episode art is Johann Köler - Hercules Removes Cerberus from the Gates of Hell, 1855. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Kyle Harper is an historian who focuses on how humanity has shaped nature, and vice versa. He's a Professor of Classics and Letters at the University of Oklahoma and the author of several books, including The Fate of Rome: Climate, Disease, and the End of an Empire, and his latest, Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History. His mastery of the science is only matched by the ease of his prose. If I were to nominate a book of the year, it would be this one (alongside Jamie Kirchick's Secret City).For two clips of our convo — on the zombie bloodsucking fleas of the Black Death, and on how Covid doomed the careers of Trump and Boris — pop over to our YouTube page. Other topics: the bubonic plague's role in the fall of the Roman Empire, the Black Death, flagellants and anti-Semitism, the plague in 17th century London, the Spanish flu, the AIDS crisis, Thucydides, Camus' La Peste, “The Roses of Eyam,” monkeypox, lab leak, and the uprising over China's ghastly Covid policy. Get full access to The Weekly Dish at andrewsullivan.substack.com/subscribe

Steven Pressfield's The Warrior Ethos is a deep historical examination of the values and ethics of warriors throughout history—from the ancient Spartans to Japan's Samurai to Alexander the Great—and how these values can be applied to the battles we each fight. We all struggle daily to find and defense our sense of purpose, to show up as our best ourselves, and to overcome the obstacles we face in our own pursuits. In that struggle, there's much we can learn and apply from the world's great warriors and warrior cultures. The Book in Three Sentences When we speak of The Warrior Ethos, we really speak of Warrior ethics and values as ethos is latin for ethics. Warriors prize virtues including courage, honor, loyalty, integrity, love, and selflessness—many of which evolved as a counterpoise to fear and self-preservation. True warriors lead from the front, they prize valor and honor as highly as victory, they embrace adversity and shared suffering, they laugh in the face of death, and they exemplify selflessness. About The Book The Warrior Ethos is really a mini-book. The book's content is drawn almost exclusively from the ancient world, from Herodotus and Arrian, Plutarch, Vegetius, Xenophon, Thucydides, etc. There are anecdotes about the Spartans, the Romans, the Macedonians, with a few thrown in from the modern British and Israelis and even the Afrika Korps under Rommel. Here's one story about Alexander the Great, taken from Plutarch, to give you the flavor of the book: Once, Alexander was leading his army through a waterless desert. The column was strung out for miles, with men and horses suffering terribly from thirst. Suddenly, a detachment of scouts came galloping back to the king. They had found a small spring and managed to fill a helmet with water. They rushed to Alexander and presented this to him. The army held in place, watching. Every man's eye was fixed upon his commander. Alexander thanked the scouts for bringing him this gift, then, without touching a drop, he lifted the helmet and poured the precious liquid into the sand. At once, a great cheer ascended, rolling from one end of the column to the other. A man was heard to say, “With a king like this to lead us, no force on earth can stand against us.” There's no other better author to write this book than Steven Pressfield. He's spent his career writing about war—external and internal wars, ancient and modern ones, real wars from history and imagined ones. One of his books, Gates of Fire, which tells the story of the 300 Spartans sent to fight and die against the Persian emperor King Xerxes, is my all-time favorite book. Steven Pressfield has also written A Man at Arms, The Virtues of War, Killing Rommel, The Afghan Campaign, Tides of War, and some incredible nonfiction books including The War of Art.

Steven Pressfield's The Warrior Ethos is a deep historical examination of the values and ethics of warriors throughout history—from the ancient Spartans to Japan's Samurai to Alexander the Great—and how these values can be applied to the battles we each fight. We all struggle daily to find and defense our sense of purpose, to show up as our best ourselves, and to overcome the obstacles we face in our own pursuits. In that struggle, there's much we can learn and apply from the world's great warriors and warrior cultures. The Warrior Ethos is really a mini-book. The book's content is drawn almost exclusively from the ancient world, from Herodotus and Arrian, Plutarch, Vegetius, Xenophon, Thucydides, etc. There are anecdotes about the Spartans, the Romans, the Macedonians, with a few thrown in from the modern British and Israelis and even the Afrika Korps under Rommel. Here's one story about Alexander the Great, taken from Plutarch, to give you the flavor of the book: Once, Alexander was leading his army through a waterless desert. The column was strung out for miles, with men and horses suffering terribly from thirst. Suddenly, a detachment of scouts came galloping back to the king. They had found a small spring and managed to fill a helmet with water. They rushed to Alexander and presented this to him. The army held in place, watching. Every man's eye was fixed upon his commander. Alexander thanked the scouts for bringing him this gift, then, without touching a drop, he lifted the helmet and poured the precious liquid into the sand. At once, a great cheer ascended, rolling from one end of the column to the other. A man was heard to say, “With a king like this to lead us, no force on earth can stand against us.”

“My cure for Platonism has always been Thucydides.” Nietzsche saw in the first historian of Ancient Greece the will to adhere to realism, and to learn the lessons of the “harsh teacher” of war. Where he sees cowardice in Plato, Nietzsche sees courage in Thucydides, as well as the “practical justice” of allowing all the parties a fair representation of their viewpoint. Thucydides, for Nietzsche, is the epitome of the Sophist tradition, which he contrasts with the moralism of Socrates and Plato. In this episode, we discuss The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides' great contribution to world literature and history.

Originally Aired: July 17, 2018 Is Trumpism a philosophy? Does it have any hint of a philosophy within it? Is there any philosopher that ever existed that would embrace Trump? Does David Sanger remember any of his college philosophy courses? On this episode, Stanford's Kori Schake, Ed Luce of the Financial Times, David Sanger of the New York Times, and David Rothkopf, who grew up in New Jersey, walk us through how Trump may have developed what pass for his philosophies and consider the nature and origins of the ideas that drive his world view. Kori Schake also brings up Thucydides again and Ed uses the term "obscurantism." Don't miss it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Originally Aired: July 17, 2018 Is Trumpism a philosophy? Does it have any hint of a philosophy within it? Is there any philosopher that ever existed that would embrace Trump? Does David Sanger remember any of his college philosophy courses? On this episode, Stanford's Kori Schake, Ed Luce of the Financial Times, David Sanger of the New York Times, and David Rothkopf, who grew up in New Jersey, walk us through how Trump may have developed what pass for his philosophies and consider the nature and origins of the ideas that drive his world view. Kori Schake also brings up Thucydides again and Ed uses the term "obscurantism." Don't miss it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I have started reading a new set of old excerpted classics, this one gathering writers' bits and baubles into generally geographic volumes: Greece, Rome, the British Isles, etc. I also write about them. (I write about another set here.) The first selection in the first volume comes from the ancient Greek historian Herodotus. (You can read my thoughts here.)  Much sharper than my own thoughts, however, are the thoughts of political theorist and Bryn Mawr professor Joel Schlosser, writer of Herodotus in the Anthropocene (The University of Chicago Press, 2020). Schlosser explores exactly what I felt reading Herodotus and what I hope anyone exploring the ancients today wants: something relevant to them now.  In our chat, Joel answers burning questions I had about Herodotus, his own personal experience discovering the ancient historian, and, most important, what we can learn right now about how we think about the world and our place in it.  Herodotus tried to figure out how the ancient Egyptians dug canals, built great buildings, and won and lost wars. And, most of all, why his Greek world was the way it was after the great battles between Persians and Greeks. Be just as curious as Herodotus! Listen ...  P.S. If you're taken by Schlosser's observations, buy his book and enjoy, also, a few of his blog posts from the past few years as he worked on it:  “While I imagined myself in conversation with Herodotus, wondering what he'd make of the anarchists' message of radical equality – was it an update of Herodotean isêgoria, the equal voice he viewed as central to Athens' flourishing? – I gazed upon the Acropolis with humbled amazement.” (link)  “Herodotus writes for an audience. He wants us to lose ourselves in the story and then to its comedy.” (link)  “Herodotus talks of the phoenix, which immolates itself only to be reborn from its ashes, as well as crocodiles and the special burials Egyptians give to their victims.” (link)  “Herodotus exemplified a form of inquiry that was broad-minded and imaginative in ways Thucydides simply wasn't.” (link) 

Sometime around 450 BC in ancient Greece, a young Thucydides went with his father to hear the historian Herodotus speak. After the lecture, Thucydides announced that writing history was his life's calling. He later wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the 27-year civil war between the Athenians and the Spartans. Thucydides believed that history is cyclical, and he saw written history as more than just record keeping. He wanted to know why certain events unfolded as they did. In fact, Thucydides is one of the first Western historians to document a historical event year by year. Professor Richard Billows is a professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in Ancient Greek and Roman history. He is the author of Before and After Alexander and Marathon: The Battle that Changed Western Civilization, among other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/new-books-network

Sometime around 450 BC in ancient Greece, a young Thucydides went with his father to hear the historian Herodotus speak. After the lecture, Thucydides announced that writing history was his life's calling. He later wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the 27-year civil war between the Athenians and the Spartans. Thucydides believed that history is cyclical, and he saw written history as more than just record keeping. He wanted to know why certain events unfolded as they did. In fact, Thucydides is one of the first Western historians to document a historical event year by year. Professor Richard Billows is a professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in Ancient Greek and Roman history. He is the author of Before and After Alexander and Marathon: The Battle that Changed Western Civilization, among other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/military-history

Sometime around 450 BC in ancient Greece, a young Thucydides went with his father to hear the historian Herodotus speak. After the lecture, Thucydides announced that writing history was his life's calling. He later wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the 27-year civil war between the Athenians and the Spartans. Thucydides believed that history is cyclical, and he saw written history as more than just record keeping. He wanted to know why certain events unfolded as they did. In fact, Thucydides is one of the first Western historians to document a historical event year by year. Professor Richard Billows is a professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in Ancient Greek and Roman history. He is the author of Before and After Alexander and Marathon: The Battle that Changed Western Civilization, among other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/literary-studies

Sometime around 450 BC in ancient Greece, a young Thucydides went with his father to hear the historian Herodotus speak. After the lecture, Thucydides announced that writing history was his life's calling. He later wrote History of the Peloponnesian War, a chronicle of the 27-year civil war between the Athenians and the Spartans. Thucydides believed that history is cyclical, and he saw written history as more than just record keeping. He wanted to know why certain events unfolded as they did. In fact, Thucydides is one of the first Western historians to document a historical event year by year. Professor Richard Billows is a professor of History at Columbia University. He specializes in Ancient Greek and Roman history. He is the author of Before and After Alexander and Marathon: The Battle that Changed Western Civilization, among other books. See more information on our website, WritLarge.fm. Follow us on Twitter @WritLargePod. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Originally Aired: August 3, 2017 We present you, our beloved Deep State nerds, with the face-off you've been anticipating all summer. Our expert team breaks down rising powers, ruling powers, and the forces that drive war. Graham Allison and Kori Schake debate The Thucydides Trap, Rosa Brooks and David Rothkopf help us make sense of the similarities between ancient and modern history, all while convincing us to read The History of the Peloponnesian War. Come for the cage match and stay until the very end for some chilling insights into North Korea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Originally Aired: August 3, 2017 We present you, our beloved Deep State nerds, with the face-off you've been anticipating all summer. Our expert team breaks down rising powers, ruling powers, and the forces that drive war. Graham Allison and Kori Schake debate The Thucydides Trap, Rosa Brooks and David Rothkopf help us make sense of the similarities between ancient and modern history, all while convincing us to read The History of the Peloponnesian War. Come for the cage match and stay until the very end for some chilling insights into North Korea. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

La Chine peut-elle devenir le maître du monde ? La question ne cesse de revenir. Dans Vers la guerre : la Chine et l'Amérique dans le piège de Thucydide ?, Graham Allison explique que dans l'Histoire, de façon régulière, un combat se déroule entre deux puissances : une puissance dominante - mais déclinante - et une autre, en croissance, amenée à prendre la place. Pour étayer son analyse, Graham Allison s'appuie sur la rivalité entre Spartes et Athènes. Il estime qu'aujourd'hui cette rivalité est entre les États-Unis et la Chine. "Hors-série Lenglet & Co", un podcast hebdomadaire présenté par François Lenglet et Sylvain Zimmermann, qui vous donne les clés pour tout comprendre des évolutions et des mutations économiques, en Europe et dans le monde.

Episode Notes:A discussion recently concluded 20th Party Congress and what to expect ahead in US China relations. I'm pleased to welcome back Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy China Strategies Group, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and former Senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the 7th Party Congress that Chris has analyzed professionally.Links:John Culver: How We Would Know When China Is Preparing to Invade Taiwan - Carnegie Endowment for International PeaceTranscript:Bill: Welcome back to the very occasional Sinocism podcast. Today we are going to talk about the recently concluded 20th Party Congress and what to expect ahead in US China relations. I'm pleased to welcome back Chris Johnson, CEO of Consultancy China Strategies Group, Senior Fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute Center for China Analysis and former Senior China analyst at the Central Intelligence Agency. This is the 7th Party Congress that Chris has analyzed professionally. So we have a lot of experience here to help us understand what just happened. Chris, welcome back and thanks for taking the time.Chris: My pleasure. Always fun to be with you, Bill.Bill: Great. Well, why don't we jump right in. I'd like to talk about what you see as the most important outcomes from the Congress starting with personnel. What do you make of the leadership team from the central committee to the Politburo to the Standing Committee and what does that say about.Chris: Yeah, well, I, think clearly Xi Jinping had a massive win, you know, with personnel. I think we see this particularly in the Politburo Standing Committee, right, where on the key portfolios that really matter to him in terms of controlling the key levers of power inside the system. So we're talking propaganda, obviously, Uh, we're talking party bureaucracy, military less so, but security services, you know, these, these sort of areas all up and down the ballot he did very well.So that's obviously very important. And I think obviously then the dropping of the so-called Communist Youth League faction oriented people in Li Keqiang and Wang Yang and, and Hu Chunhua being  kind of unceremoniously kicked off the Politburo, that tells us that. He's not in the mood to compromise with any other  interest group.I prefer to call them rather than factions. Um, so that sort of suggests to us that, you know, models that rely on that kind of an analysis are dead. It has been kind of interesting in my mind to see how quickly though that, you know, analysts who tend to follow that framework already talking about the, uh, factional elements within Xi's faction, right?So, you know, it's gonna be the Shanghai people versus the Zhijiang Army versus the Fujian people. Bill: people say there's a Tsinghua factionChris: Right. The, the infamous, non infamous Tsinghua clique and, and and so on. But I think as we look more closely, I mean this is all kidding aside, if we look more closely at the individuals, what we see is obviously these people, you know, loyalty to Xi is, is sort of like necessary, but not necessarily sufficient in explaining who these people are. Also, I just always find it interesting, you know, somehow over. Wang Huning has become a Xi Jinping loyalist. I mean, obviously he plays an interesting role for Xj Jinping, but I don't think we should kid ourselves in noting that he's been kind of shunted aside Right by being pushed into the fourth position on the standing committee, which probably tells us that he will be going to oversee the Chinese People's Consultative Congress, which is, you know, kind of a do nothing body, you know, for the most part. And, um, you know, my sense has long been, One of Xi Jinping's, I think a couple factors there with Wang Huning.Sinocism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.One is, you know, yes, he is very talented at sort of taking their very, uh, expansive, um, theoretical ideas and coming up with snappy, um, snappy sort of catchphrases, right? This is clearly his, um, his sort of claim to fame. But, you know, we had that article last year from the magazine, Palladium that kind of painted him as some sort of an éminence grise or a Rasputin like figure, you know, in terms of his role.Uh, you know, my sense has always been, uh, as one contact, put it to me one time. You know, the issue is that such analyses tend to confuse the musician with the conductor. In other words,  Xi Jinping.  is pretty good at ideology, right? And party history and the other things that I think the others had relied on.I think the second thing with Wang Huning is, um, in a way XI can't look at him I don't think, without sort of seeing here's a guy who's changed flags, as they would say, right? He served three very different leaders, Jiang Zemin, Hu Jintao, and now Xi , um, and, and continued on and I think at some level, uh, and we look at the rest of the appointments where it appears that, uh, loyalty was much more important than merit.Um, where that's also a question mark. So there's those issues I think on the Politburo. You know, you mentioned the, the Tsinghua clique it was very interesting. You had shared with me, uh, Desmond Shum of Red Roulette fame's Twitter stream sort of debunking, you know, this, this Tsinghua clique and saying, well, it turns out in fact that the new Shanghai Municipal Party Secretary Chen Jining can't stand Chen Xi, even though, you know, they both went to Tsinghua and were there at the same time and so on.Um, you know, who knows with Desmond Shum, but I think he knows some things, right? And, and, and it just a reminder to us all, I think, how little we understand right, about these relationships, especially now, uh, with Xi's concentration of power. And also a situation where we've had nearly three years of covid isolationBill: Right. And so it's really hard to go talk to people, even the fewer and fewer numbers, people who, who know something and can talk. Back to the standing committee. I, I think certainly just from friends and contacts the biggest surprise you know, I think, uh was Li Keqiang and Wang Yang not sticking around. And as that long explainer said without naming them they were good comrades who steps aside for the good of the party in the country,Chris: Because that happens so often,Bill: whatever that means. Um, but really the, the bigger surprise was that, oh, Cai Qi showing up. Who I think when you look at the standing committee, I think the general sense is, okay, the, these people are all, you know, not, they're loyal, but they're also competent, like Li Qiang, Chris: Right, Bill: The likely new premier number two on the standing committee is pretty competent. The Shanghai lockdown, disaster aside, Cai Qi on the other hand, was just, looks more like, it's just straight up loyalty to Xi. I think he was not really on anybody's short list of who was gonna make it on there. And so, it does feel like something happened, right?Chris: Yeah. Well, um, a couple things there. I think, um, one, let's start with the. The issue you raised about the economic team cuz I think that's actually very important. Um, you know, I, at some level, sometimes I feel like I'm sort of tiring my, of my role as official narrative buster or a windmill tilter.Uh, whether, whether it's pushback from Li Keqiang or the myth of the savior premier as I was calling it, which, uh, we didn't see, or that these norms actually aren't very enduring and it's really about power politics. I, I think I'm kind of onto a new one now, which is, you know, Xi Jin ping's new team of incompetent sycophants.Right? That's kind of the label that's, uh, come out in a lot of the takes, uh, since the Congress. But to your point, I mean, you know, Li Qiang has run the three most important economic powerhouses on China's east coast, either as governor or as party chief. Right. He seems to have had a, a good relationship with both.Private sector businesses and, and foreign, you know, people forget that, you know, he got the Tesla plant built in Shanghai in a year basically. Right. And it's, uh, responsible for a very significant amount of, of Tesla's total input of vehicles. Output of vehicles. Excuse me. Um, likewise, I hear that Ding Xuexiang, even though we don't know a lot about him, uh, was rather instrumental in things.Breaking the log jam with the US uh, over the de-listing of Chinese ADRs, uh, that he had played an important role in convincing Xi Jinping it would not be a good idea, for example, to, uh, you know, we're already seeing, uh, sort of decoupling on the technology side. It would not be a good idea to encourage the Americans to decouple financially as well. So the point is I think we need to just all kind of calm down, right? And, and see how these people perform in office. He Lifeng, I think is perhaps, you know, maybe more of a question mark, but, But here too, I think it's important for us to think about how their system worksThe political report sets the frame, right? It tells us what. Okay, this is the ideological construct we're working off of, or our interpretation, our dialectical interpretation of what's going on. And that, I think the signal there was what I like to call this fortress economy, right? So self-sufficiency and technology and so on.And so then when we look at the Politburo appointments, you can see that they align pretty closely to that agenda, right? These people who've worked in state firms or scientists and you know, so on and forth.Bill: Aerospace, defenseChris: Yeah, Aerospace. Very close alignment with that agenda. I'm not saying this is the right choice for China or that it even will be successful, I'm just saying it makes sense, you know,Bill: And it is not just sycophants it is actually loyal but some expertise or experience in these key sectors Chris: Exactly.  Yeah, and, and, and, and of interest as well. You know, even people who have overlapped with Xi Jinping. How much overlap did they have? How much exposure did they have? You know, there's a lot of discussion, for example, about the new propaganda boss, Li Shulei being very close to Xi and likewise Shi Taifeng.Right? Uh, both of whom were vice presidents at the party school when, when Xi also was there. Um, but remember, you know, he was understudy to Hu Jintao at the time, you know, I mean, the party school thing was a very small part of his portfolio and they were ranked lower, you know, amongst the vice presidents of the party school.So how much actual interaction did he have? So there too, you know, I think, uh, obviously. , yes these people will do what Xi Jinping wants them to do, but that doesn't mean they're not competent. On Cai Qi, I agree with you. I think it's, it's, it's difficult. You know, my speculation would be a couple of things.One, proximity matters, right? He's been sitting in Beijing the last five years, so he is, had the opportunity to, uh, be close to the boss and, and impact that. I've heard some suggestions from contacts, which I think makes some. He was seen as more strictly enforcing the zero Covid policy. Right. In part because he is sitting in Beijing than say a Chen Min'er, right.Who arguably was a other stroke better, you know, candidate for that position on the Politburo standing committee. And there, you know, it will be interesting to see, you know, we're not sure the musical chairs have not yet finished. Right. The post party Congress for people getting new jobs. But you know, for example, if Chen Min'er stays out in Chongqing, that seems like a bit of a loss for him.Bill: Yeah, he needs to go somewhere else if he's got any hope of, um, sort of, But so one thing, sorry. One thing on the Politburo I thought was really interesting, and I know we've talked about offline, um, is that the first time the head of the Ministry State Security was, was. Promoted into the Politburo - Chen Wenqing.  And now he is the Secretary of the Central Political Legal Affairs Commission, the party body that oversees the entire security services system and legal system. and what do you think that says about priorities and, and, and where Xi sees things going?Chris: Well, I think it definitely aligns with this concept of Xi Jiping's of comprehensive national security. Right. We've, we've seen and heard and read a lot about that and it seems that the, uh, number of types of security endlessly proliferate, I think we're up to 13 or 14Bill: Everything is National Security in Xi's China.Chris: Yeah. Everything is, is national security. Uh, that's one thing I think it's interesting perhaps in the, in the frame of, you know, in an era where they are becoming a bigger power and therefore, uh, have more resources and so on. You know, is that role that's played by the Ministry of State Security, which is, you know, they have this unique role, don't they?They're in a way, they're sort of the US' Central Intelligence Agency and, and FBI, Federal Bureau of Investigation combined, and that they do have that internal security role as well, but, They are the foreign civilian anyway, uh, foreign intelligence collection arm. So perhaps, you know, over time there's been some sense that they realized, yes, cyber was great for certain things, but you still need human intelligence.Uh, you know, we don't know how well or not Chen Wenqing has performed, but you know, obviously there, this has been a relentless campaign, you know, the search for spies and so on and so forth. Um, I also think it says something about what we seem to be seeing emerging here, which is an effort to take what previously were these, you know, warring, uh, administrative or ministerial factions, right, of the Ministry of Public Security MPS, the MSS, uh, and even the party's, uh, discipline watchdog, the, uh, Central Commission on Discipline inspection, you know, in an effort to sort of knit those guys into one whole.And you know, it is interesting.Chen wending has experience in all three of those. He started off, I think as a street cop. Um, he did serve on the discipline inspection commission under, uh, Wang Qishan when things were, you know, really going  in that department in the early part of, Xi's tenure and then he's headed, uh, the Ministry of State Security.I think, you know, even more interesting probably is. The, uh, formation of the new secretariat, right? Where we have both Chen Wenqing on there and also Wang Xiaohong as a minister of Public Security, but also as a deputy on the CPLAC, right? And a seat on the secretariat. And if we look at the, um, The gentleman who's number two in the discipline inspection, uh, space, he was a longtime police officer as well.So that's very unusual. You know, uh, his name's escaping me at the moment. But, um, you know, so in effect you have basically three people on the Secretariat with security backgrounds and, you know, that's important. It means other portfolios that might be on the secretariat that have been dumped, right? So it shows something about the prioritization, uh, of security.And I think it's interesting, you know, we've, we've often struggled to understand what is the National Security Commission, how does it function, You know, these sort of things. And it's, it's still, you know, absolutely clear as mud. But what was interesting was that, you know, from whatever that early design was that had some aspect at least of looking a bit like the US style, National Security Commission, they took on a much more sort of internal looking flavor.And it had always been my sort of thought that one of the reasons Xi Jinping created this thing was to break down, you know, those institutional rivalries and barriers and force, you know, coordination on these, on these institutions. So, you know, bottom line, I think what we're seeing is a real effort by Xi Jinping to You know, knit together a comprehensive, unified, and very effective, you know, stifling, really security apparatus. And, uh, I don't expect to see that change anytime soon. And then, you know, as you and I have been discussing recently, we also have, uh, another Xi loyalist Chen Yixin showing up as Chen Wenqing's successor right at the Ministry of State SecurityBill: And he remains Secretary General of the Political and Legal Affairs Commission too.Chris: Exactly. So, you know, from, from a, a sheet home where Xi Jinping five years ago arguably had very loose control, if at all, we now have a situation where he's totally dominant. Bill: I think the, the official on the Secretariat, I think it's Liu Jinguo.Chris: That's the one. Yes. Thank you. I'm getting old…Bill: He also has, has a long history of the Ministry of Public Security system. Um, but yeah, it does, it does seem like it's a, it's a real, I mean it, I I, I don't wanna use the word securitization, but it does like this is the indication of a, of a real, sort of, it just sort of fits with the, the general trend  towards much more focus on national security. I mean, what about on the, the Central Military Commission? Right? Because one of the surprises was, um, again, and this is where the norms were broken, where you have Zhang Youxia, who should have retired based on his age, but he's 72, he's on the Politburo he stays as a vice chair of the CMCChris: Yep. Yeah, no, at, at, at the rip old age of 72. It's a little hard, uh, to think of him, you know, mounting a tank or something  to go invade Taiwan or whatever the, you know, whatever the case may be. But, you know, I, I think here again, the narratives might be off base a little bit, you know, it's this issue of, you know, well he's just picked, you know, these sycophantic loyalists, He's a guy who has combat experience, right?And that's increasingly rare. Um, I don't think it's any surprise that. That himself. And, uh, the, uh, uh, gentleman on the CMC, uh, Li, who is now heading the, um, Joint Chiefs of Staff, he also has Vietnam combat experience, not from 79, but from the, uh, the border incursions that went on into the80s. Um, so it's not that surprising really.But, but obviously, you know, Zhang Youxia is very close to Xi Jinping, their father's fought together, right? Um, and they have that sort of, uh, blood tie and Xi is signaling, I want, uh, I. Political control and also technologically or, or, um, you know, operationally competent people. I think the other fascinating piece is we see once again no vice chairman from the political commissar iatside of the PLA.I think that's very interesting. You know, a lot of people, including myself, were betting that Miao HuaWould, would, would get the promotion. He didn't, you know, we can't know. But my sense is in a way, Xi Jiping is still punishing that side of the PLA for Xu Caihou's misdoings. Right. You know, and that's very interesting in and of itself.Also, it may be a signal that I don't need a political commissar vice chairman because I handle the politicsBill: And, and, and he, yeah. And in this, this new era that the, the next phase of the Xi era, it, it is, uh, everybody knows, right? It's, it's all about loyalty to Xi.Chris: we just saw right, uh, today, you know, uh, yet, yet more instructions about the CMC responsibilities, Chairman, responsibility systems. Bill: Unfortunately they didn't release the full text but it would be fascinating to see what's in there.Chris: And they never do on these things, which is, uh, which is tough. But, um, you know, I think we have a general sense of what would be in it, . But, but even that itself, right, you know, is a very major thing that people, you know, didn't really pick up. Certain scholars, certainly like James Mulvenon and other people who are really good on this stuff noticed it. But this shift under Hu Jintao was a CMC vice chairman responsibility system. In other words, he was subletting the operational matters certainly to his uniformed officers, Xi Jinping doesn't do thatBill: Well, this, and here we are, right where he can indeed I mean, I, I had written in the newsletter, um, you know, that she had, I thought, I think he ran the table in terms of personnel.Chris: Oh, completely. Yeah.Bill: And this is why it is interesting he kept around folks like Wang Huning, but we'll move on. The next question I had really was about Xi's report to the party Congress and we had talked, I think you'd also, um, you've talked about on our previous podcasts, I mean there, there seems to be a pretty significant shift in the way Xi is talking about the geopolitical environment and their assessment and how they see the world. Can you talk about a little bit?Chris: Yeah, I mean, I think definitely we saw some shifts there and, uh, you know, you and I have talked a lot about it. You know, there are problems with word counting, right? You know, and when you look at the thing and you just do a machine search, and it's like, okay, well security was mentioned 350 times or whatever, but, but the, you know, in what context?Right. Um, and, uh, our, uh, mutual admiration society, the, uh, the China Media project, uh, I thought they did an excellent piece on that sort of saying, Remember, it's the words that go around the buzzword that matter, you know, just as much. But what we can say unequivocally is that two very important touchstones that kind of explain their thinking on their perception of not only their external environment, but really kind of their internal environment, which had been in the last several political reports, now are gone. And those are this idea of China's enjoying a period of strategic opportunity and this idea that peace and development are the underlying trend of the times. And, you know, on the period of strategic opportunity, I think it's important for a couple reasons. One, just to kind of break that down for our listeners in a way that's not, you know, sort of, uh, CCP speak, , uh, the, the basic idea was that China judged that it's external security environment was sufficiently benign, that they could focus their energies on economic development.Right? So obviously that's very important. I also think it was an important governor, and I don't think I've seen anything out there talking about its absence in this, uh, political report on this topic, It was a, it was an important governor on sort of breakneck Chinese military development, sort of like the Soviet Union, right?In other words, as long as you were, you know, sort of judging that your external environment was largely benign, you. Didn't really have a justification to have a massive defense budget or to be pushy, you know, in the neighborhood, these sort of things. And people might poo poo that and sort of say, Well, you know, this is all just rhetoric and so on. No, they actually tend to Bill: Oh, that's interesting. Well, then that fits a little bit, right, Cuz they added the, the wording around strategic deterrence in the report as well  which is seen as a, you know, modernizing, expanding their nuclear forces, right?Chris: Exactly, right. So, you know, that's, uh, an important absence and the fact that, you know, the word, again, word searching, right. Um, strategic and opportunity are both in there, but they're separated and balanced by this risks and challenges, languages and, and so on. Bill: Right the language is very starkly different. Chris: Yeah. And then likewise on, on peace and development. This one, as you know, is, is even older, right? It goes back to the early eighties, I believe, uh, that it's been in, in these political reports. And, uh, you know, there again, the idea was sort of not only was this notion that peace and economic development were the dominant, you know, sort of trend internationally, globally, they would be an enduring one. You know, this idea of the trend of the times, right? Um, now that's missing. So what has replaced it in both these cases is this spirit of struggle, right? Um, and so that's a pretty stark departure and that in my mind just sort of is a real throwback to what you could call the period of maximum danger for the regime in the sixties, right? When they had just split off with the Soviets and they were still facing unremitting hostility from the west after the Korean War experience and, and so on. So, you know, there's definitely a, a decided effort there. I think also we should view the removal of these concepts as a culmination of a campaign that Xi Jinping has been on for a while.You know, as you and I have discussed many times before, from the minute he arrived, he began, I think, to paint this darker picture of the exterior environment. And he seems to have always wanted to create a sort of sense of urgency, certainly maybe even crisis. And I think a big part of that is to justifying the power grab, right? If the world outside is hostile, you need, you know, a strongman. Bill: Well that was a lot of the propaganda going into the Party of Congress about the need for sort of a navigator helmsman because know, we we're, we're closest we have ever been to the great rejuvenation, but it's gonna be really hard and we need sort of strong leadership right. It was, it was all building to that. This is why Ci needs to stay for as long as he wants to stay.Chris: and I think we saw that reflected again just the other day in this Long People's Daily piece by Ding Xuexing, right, Where he's talking again about the need for unity, the throwback, as you mentioned in your newsletter to Mao's commentary, there is not to be lost on any of us you know, the fact that the Politburo standing committee's. Uh, first field trip is out to Yan'an, right? I mean, you know, these are messages, right? The aren't coincidental.Bill: No, it, it is. The thing that's also about the report that's interesting is that while there was, speaking of word counts, there was no mention of the United States, but it certainly feels like that was the primary backdrop for this entire discussion around. So the, the shifting geopolitical, uh, assessments and this broader, you know, and I think one of the things that I, and I want to talk to as we get into this, a little bit about US China relations, but is it she has come to the conclusion that the US is implacably effectively hostile, and there is no way that they're gonna get through this without some sort of a broader struggle?Chris: I don't know if they, you know, feel that conflict is inevitable. In fact, I kind of assume they don't think that because that's pretty grim picture for them, you know? Um, but I, I do think there's this notion that. They've now had two years to observe the Biden administration. Right? And to some degree, I think it's fair to say that by certain parties in the US, Xi Jinping, maybe not Xi Jinping, but a Wang Qishan or some of these characters were sold a bit of a bag of goods, right?Oh, don't worry, he's not Trump, he's gonna, things will be calmer. We're gonna get back to dialogue and you know, so on and so forth. And that really hasn't happened. And when we look at. Um, when we look at measures like the recent, chip restrictions, which I'm sure we'll discuss at some point, you know, that would've been, you know, the, the wildest dream, right of certain members of the Trump administration to do something that, uh, that's that firm, right? So, um, I think the conclusion of the Politburo then must be, this is baked into the cake, right? It's bipartisan. Um, the earliest we'll see any kind of a turn here is 2024. I think they probably feel. Um, and therefore suddenly things like a no limits partnership with Russia, right, start to make more sense. Um, but would really makes sense in that if that is your framing, and I think it is, and you therefore see the Europeans as like a swing, right, in this equation. This should be a great visit, right, for Chancellor Scholz, uh, and uh, I can't remember if it was you I was reading or someone else here in the last day or so, but this idea that if the Chinese are smart, they would get rid of these sanctions on Bill: That was me. Well, that was in my newsletterChris: Yeah. Parliamentary leaders and you know, Absolutely. Right. You know, that's a no brainer, but. I don't think they're gonna do it , but, but you know, this idea definitely that, and, and when they talk in the political report, you know, it, it's, it's like, sir, not appearing in this film, right, from Money Python, but we know who the people who are doing the bullying, you know, uh, is and the long armed jurisdiction and , so on and so forth and all, I mean, all kidding aside, I think, you know, they will see something like the chip restrictions effectively as a declaration of economic war. I don't think that's going too far to say that.Bill: It goes to the heart of their sort of technological project around rejuvenation. I mean, it is, it is a significant. sort of set of really kind of a, I would think, from the Chinese perspective aggressive policies against them,Chris: Yeah, and I mean, enforcement will be key and we'll see if, you know, licenses are granted and how it's done. And we saw, you know, already some, some backing off there with regard to this US person, uh, restriction and so on. But, but you know, it's still pretty tough stuff. There's no two ways aboutBill: No, and I, I wonder, and I worry that here in DC. You know, where the mood is very hawkish. If, if people here really fully appreciate sort of the shift that's taking, that seems to be taking place in Beijing and how these actions are viewed.Chris: Well, I, I think that's a really, you put your hand on it really, really interesting way, Bill, because, you know, let's face it really since the Trump trade war started, right? We've all analysts, you know, pundits, uh, even businesses and government people have been sort of saying, you know, when are the Chinese gonna punch back? You know, when are they going to retaliate? Right? And we talk about rare earths and we talk about Apple and TeslaBill: They slapped some sanctions on people but they kind of a jokeChris:  And I guess what I'm saying is I kind of worry we're missing the forest from the trees. Right. You know, the, the, the work report tells us, the political report tells us how they're reacting. Right. And it is hardening the system, moving toward this fortress economy, you know, so on and so forth. And I wanna be real clear here, you know, they're not doing this just because they're reacting to the United States. Xi Jinping presumably wanted to do this all along, but I don't think we can say that the actions they perceive as hostile from the US aren't playing a pretty major role in allowing him to accelerate.Bill: Well, they called me. Great. You justifying great Accelerationist, right? Trump was called that as well, and, and that, that's what worries me too, is we're in. Kind of toxic spiral where, where they see us doing something and then they react. We see them do something and we react and, and it doesn't feel like sort of there's any sort of a governor or a break and I don't see how we figure that out.Chris: Well, I think, you know, and I'm sure we'll come to this later in our discussion, but you know, uh, yes, that's true, but you know, I'm always deeply skeptical of these inevitability memes, whether it's, you know, Thucydides trap or, you know, these other things. Last time I checked, there is something called political agency, right?In other words, leaders can make choices and they can lead if they want to, right? They have an opportunity to do so at in Bali, and you know, we'll have to see some of the, you know, early indications are perhaps they're looking at sort of a longer meeting. So that would suggest maybe there will be some discussion of some of these longstanding issues.Maybe we will see some of the usual, you know, deliverable type stuff. So there's an opportunity. I, I think one question is, can the domestic politics on either side allow for seizing that opportunity? You know, that's an open.Bill: Interesting. There's a couple things in the party constitution, which I think going into the Congress, you know, they told us they were gonna amend the Constitution. There were expectations that it, the amendments were gonna reflect an increase in Xi's power, uh, things like this, this idea of the two establishments, uh, which for listeners are * "To establish the status of Comrade Xi Jinping as the core of the Party's Central Committee and of the whole Party"* "To establish the guiding role of Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for the New Era"The thinking, and I, I certainly believe that, I thought that they would write that in. There was some talk that, uh, Xi Jinping Thought the longer version would be truncated to just Xi Jinping thought. that possibly he might get, a, a sort of another title like People's Leader. None of those happened. One thing that did happen, What's officially translated by the Chinese side in English as the two upholds- “Uphold the 'core' status of General Secretary Xi Jinping within the CC and “Uphold the centralized authority of the Party” those were written in. And so the question is, was there some kind of pushback or are we misreading we what mattered? And actually the two upholds are more important than the two of establishes.Chris: Well, I, and I think it, this may be a multiple choice answer, right? There might be elements of all the above in there. Uh, you know, I think it is important that he didn't get the truncation to Xi Jinping thought. You have to think that that was something he was keen on. In retrospect, it may be that it was something akin. I've always felt, you know, another thing that was on the table that didn't happen was reestablishing the party chairmanship. My view had always been he was using that largely as a bargaining chip. That, you know, in some ways it creates more trouble than it's worth you. If you're gonna have a chairman, you probably have to have vice chairman and what does that say about the succession? I mean, of course he could have, you know, a couple of geezers on there.  as vice chairman too. , But I, my view was always is he was holding that out there to trade away. Right. You know, at, at the last minute. Um, maybe that's what happened with Xi Jinping thought. I don't know.You know, uh, there have been some media articles, one of which, You and I were discussing yesterday from, uh, the Japanese, uh, publication Nikkei, you know, that suggested that, you know, the elders had, this was their last gasp, right? So the Jiang Zemins and the Zeng Qinghongs and Hu Jinataos, so on. Um, I'm a little skeptical of that. It is possible. Uh, but, um, I, I'd be a little skeptical of that. You know, it's, it's not at all clear that they had any kind of a role, you know, even at Beidaihe this year and so on, Jiang Zemin didn't even attend the Party Congress so clearly, you know, he must be pretty frail or he thought it was not with his time. You know, a little hard to say, but, you know, I kind of struggle with the notion that, you know, the 105 year old Song Ping gets up on a chair or something and starts,  starts making trouble. Right. You know, uh, the poor man's probably lucky if he stays awake during the meeting. Bill: One question, and again, because of the, just, you know, how much more opaque Chinese politics are than the really I think they've ever been. Um, but just one question. It mean, is it possible, for example, that you know, it's more important to get the personnel done. It's more, and then once you get your, you stack the central committee, you get the politburo, you get the standing committee, that these things are sort of a next phase.Chris: yeah, it's entirely possible and, and I think it, it, it does dovetail with this idea that, you know, another reflection from both the political report and the lineup in my mind, is Xi Jinping is a man in a hurry. Right? And he's kind of projected that, as you said, the great accelerator since he arrived.But I think he sees this next five years is really fundamental, right in terms of breaking through on these chokepoint technologies as they call them. You know, these sort of things. And so maybe therefore having the right people in place to handle, you know, uh, speedier policy, execution, you know, was more important.Likewise, I mean, he's sort of telegraphing, He's gonna be around for a while, right? No successor, no visible successor anywhere. Bill: A successor would need likely need five years on the standing committee. So we're looking at ten more years.Chris: Yes, exactly. And so there will be time. The other thing is, um, Xi Jinping is a, is a sort of determined fellow, right? You know, so of interest, even before the 19th Party Congress, I'd been hearing very strong rumors that the notion of lingxiu was out there, that he was contemplating it, right? And so then we see the buildup with, uh, Renmin lingxiu and so on and so forth.And, you know, it didn't happen clearly at the 19th. It didn't happen. But it doesn't mean it won't, you know, at some point. And I think it's really important also to think about, you know, We just saw a pretty serious, um, enterprise of the, you know, quote unquote norm busting, right? So what's to say that mid-course in this five years, he doesn't, uh, hold another sort of extraordinary conference of party delegates like them, Deng Xiaoping did in 1985, right, to push through some of these. You never know, right? In other words, these things don't necessarily have to happen. Just at Party Congresses. So my guess is, you know, this isn't over yet. Uh, but you know, at some level, given how the system was ramping up with those articles about Navigator and the people's leader stuff and so on, you know, that's usually a tell, and yet it didn't happen. And, and so something interesting there. Bill: now they're in the mode of, they're out with these sort of publicity, propaganda education teams where they go out throughout the country and talk about the spirit of the party Congress and push all the key messaging. Um, you know, so far none of those People's leader truncation have happened in that, which is I think an area where some people thought, Well, maybe that could sort of come after the Congress.Chris: What is interesting is it's all two establishments all the time in those discussions, so that's been very interesting since it didn't make it into the, uh, into the document. I guess the other thing is, At some level, is it sort of a distinction without a difference? You know, I, I haven't done the work on this to see, but my guess is short of, you know, the many times they've just junked the entire constitution and rewritten it, this is probably the most amendments there have been, you know, in the to at one time. You know, to the 1982 constitution, and most of them are his various buzzwords. Right. Um, and you know, I think you've been talking about this in the newsletter, there may very well be, uh, something to this issue of, you know, which is the superior thought two establishments or to upholds/safeguards?Bill: and even if the two establishes were superior and then it didn't go in, then somehow it will be theoretically flipped to what got in the ConstitutionChris: I mean, I guess the, the, the thing though where we, it's fair to say that maybe this wasn't his ideal outcome. To me, there's been a very clear and you know, structured stepwise approach on the ideology from the word go. Right? And the first was to create right out of the shoot, this notion of, you know, three eras, right?The, Mao period, Deng  and those other guys we don't talk about it anymore, period.  and Xi Jinping's new era, right? And then that was. You know, sort of crystallized right at the 19th Party Congress when you know, Xi Jinping thought for horribly long name went into the Constitution. And so, you know, the next step kind of seemed like that should be it.And as we've discussed before, you know, if he's able to get just Thought, it certainly enhances his ability to stay around for a very long time and it makes his diktats and so on even more unquestionable. But you know, you can say again, matter of prioritization. With a team where there's really no visible or other opposition, does it really matter? You know, in other words, no one's gonna be questioning his policy ideas anyway.Bill: Just an aside, but on  his inspection, the new standing committee will go on group trip right after the Party Congress and the first trip sends key messages. And group went to Yan'an, you know, they went, they went to the caves. Um, and you know, in the long readout or long CCTV report of the meeting, the visit, there was a section where the tour guide or the person introducing some of the exhibits talked about how the, the famous song, the East Is Red was,  by a person, written by the people sort of spontaneously, and it w it definitely caused some tittering about, well, what are they trying to signal for?You know, are we gonna be seeing some  Xi songs? there's some kind of really interesting signaling going on that I don't think we quite have figured out how to parse Chris: My takeaway on all this has been, I, I need to go back and do a little more book work on, you know, what was, what was the content of the seventh party Congress? What were the outcomes? I mean, I have the general sense, right? Like you, I immediately, you know, started brushing up on it. But, you know, Xi delivered a, an abridged work report. Right, A political report, which is exactly what Mao did then. I mean, in other words, they're not kidding around with the parallelism here. The question is what's the message?Bill: Just for background, at the visit last week to Yan'an, and the first spot that was in the propaganda was the, the, site of the seventh party Congress which is where…to be very simplistic, the seventh party was really moment, you know, as at the end of the Yan'am rectification came in, it was the moment where sort of Mao fully asserted his dominance throughout the system. Mao Thought etc. Right? The signaling, you could certainly, could certainly take a view that, you know, he doesn't do these things by coincidence, and this is. This is signaling both of, you know, can through anything because they, livedin caves and ended up beating the Japanese and then won the Civil War. You know this, and we can, and by the way, we have a dominant leader. I mean, there are ways, again, I'm being simplistic, but the symbolism was not, I think one that would, for example, give a lot of confidence to investors, which I think is, you know, one, one of the many reasons we've seen until the rumors earlier this week, a, pretty big selloff in the, in the Hong Kong and manland stock markets rightChris: most definitely. And I think, you know, this is the other thing about, about what I was trying to get at earlier with, uh, forest and trees, right? You know, in other words, . Um, he's been at this for a while too. You know, there's a reason why he declared a new long march right in depths of the trade war with Trump.Bill: And a new historical resolution, only the third in historyChris: Yeah. And they have been stepwise building since then. And this is the next building block.Bill: The last thought, I mean, he is 69. He's. 10 years younger than President Joe Biden. He could go, he could be around for a long timeBill: well just quickly, cause I know, uh, we don't have that much more time, but I, you say anything about your thoughts on Hu Jintao and what happened?My first take having had a father and a stepfather had dementia was, um, you know, maybe too sympathetic to the idea that, okay, he's having some sort of a senior cognitive moment. You know, you can get. easily agitated, and you can start a scene. And so therefore, was humiliating and symbolic at the end of the Communist Youth League faction, but maybe it was, it was benign as opposed to some of the other stuff going around. But I think might be wrong so I'd love your take on that.  Chris: Well, I, I think, you know, I, I kind of shared your view initially when I watched the, uh, I guess it was an AFP had the first, you know, sort of video that was out there and, you know, he appeared to be stumbling around a bit. He definitely looked confused and, you know, like, uh, what we were discussing earlier on another subject, this could be a multiple choice, you know, A and B or whatever type scenario as well.We don't know, I mean, it seems pretty well established that he has Parkinson's, I think the lead pipe pincher for me though, was that second longer one Singapore's channel, Channel News Asia put out. I mean, he is clearly tussling with Li Zhanshu about something, right. You know that that's. Yes, very clear. And you know, if he was having a moment, you know, when they finally get him up out of the chair and he seems to be kind of pulling back and so on, you know, he moves with some alacrity there,  for an 80 year old guy. Uh, I don't know if he was being helped to move quickly or he, you know, realized it was time to exit stage.Right. But I think, you know, as you said in your newsletter, I, we probably will never know. Um, but to me it looked an awful lot like an effort by Xi Jinping to humiliate him. You know, I mean, there was a reason why they brought the cameras back in at that moment, you know? Unless we believe that that just happened spontaneously in terms of Hu Jintao has his freak out just as those cameras were coming back in the stone faces of the other members of the senior leadership there on the rostrum and you know, Wand Hunting, pulling Li Zhanshu back down kind of saying basically, look buddy, this is politics, don't you don't wanna, that's not a good look for you trying to care for Hu Jintao. You know, I mean obviously something was going on, you know? No, no question. Bill: Right. And feeds into  the idea that Hu Chunhua, we all expected that he at least be on the Politburo again, and he's, he's off, so maybe something, something was going Chris: Well, I, I think what we know from observing Xi Jinping, right? We know that this is a guy who likes to keep people off balance, right? Who likes to keep the plate spinning. He, this is definitely the Maoist element of his personality, you know, whether it's strategic disappearances or this kind of stuff. And I think it's entirely plausible that he might have made some last minute switches right, to, uh, the various lists that were under consideration that caused alarm, you know, among those who thought they were on a certain list and  and no longer were.Bill: and then, and others who were smart enough to realize that if he made those switches, they better just go with it.Chris: Yeah, go along with it. Exactly. I mean, you know, in some ways the most, aside from what happened to Hu Jintao, the, the most, um, disturbing or compelling, depending on how you wanna look at it, part of that video is when Hu Jintao, you know, sort of very, um, delicately taps Li Keqiang on the shoulder. He doesn't even look at it, just keeps looking straight ahead. Uh, and that's tough. And as you pointed out in the newsletter and elsewhere, you know, how difficult must have that have been for Hu Jintao's son Hu Haifeng, who's in the audience watching this all go on? You know, it's, uh, it's tough. Bill: And then two two days later attends a meeting where he praises Xi to high heaven.Chris: Yeah, exactly. So, so if the darker narrative is accurate, I guess one thing that concerns me a bit is, as you know, well, I have never been a fan of these, uh, memes about comparing Xi Jinping to either Stalin or Mao in part because I don't see him as a whimsical guy. They were whimsical people. I think because of his tumultuous upbringing, he understands the problems with that kind of an approach to life, but this was a very ruthless act. If that more malign, you know, sort of definition is true and that I think that says something about his mentality that perhaps should concern us if that's the case. Bill: It has real implications, not just for domestic also potentially for its foreign policy.Chris: Absolutely. I mean, what it shows, right to some degree, again, man in a hurry, this is a tenacious individual, right?  if he's willing to do that. And so if you're gonna, you know, kick them in the face on chips and, you know, things like that, um, you should be taking that into consideration.Bill: And I think preparing for a more substantive response  that is more thought out and it's also, it happened, it wasn't very Confucian for all this talk Confucian definitely not. and values. One last question, and it is related is what do you make of this recent upsurge or talk in DC from various officials that PRC has accelerated its timeline to absorb Taiwan, because nothing in the public documents indicates any shift in that timeline.Chris: No. Uh, and well, first of all, do they, do they have a timeline? Right? You know, I mean, the whole idea of a timeline is kind of stupid, right? You don't, if you're gonna invade somewhere, you say, Hey, we're gonna do it on on this date. I mean, 2049. Okay. Bill: The only timeline that I think you can point to is is it the second centenary goal and, and Taiwan getting quote unquote, you know, returning Taiwan to the motherland's key to the great rejuvenation,Chris: Yeah, you can't have rejuvenation without it. Bill: So then it has to be done by 2049. 27 years, but they've never come out and specifically said 27 years or 2049. But that's what No. that's I think, is where the timeline idea comes from.Chris: Oh yes, definitely. And, and I think some confusion of. What Xi Jinping has clearly set out and reaffirmed in the political report as these important, um, operational benchmarks for the PLA, the People's Liberation Army to achieve by its hundredth anniversary in 2027. But that does not a go plan for Taiwan make, you know, And so it's been confusing to me trying to understand this. And of course, you know, I, I'm joking, but I'm not, you know, if we, if we listen now to the chief of naval operations of the US Navy, you know, like they're invading tomorrow, basically.My former colleague from the CIA, John Culver's, done some very, you know, useful public work on this for the Carnegie, where he sort his endowment, where he sort of said, you know, look, there's certain things we would have to see, forget about, you know, a D-day style invasion, any type of military action that, that you don't need intelligence methods to find out. Right. You know, uh, canceling, uh, conscription, demobilization cycles, you know, those, those sort of things. Um, we don't see that happening. So I've been trying to come to grips with why the administration seems fairly seized with this and and their public commentary and so on. What I'm confident of is there's no smoking gun you know, unlike, say the Russia piece where it appears, we had some pretty compelling intelligence. There doesn't seem to be anything that says Xi Jinping has ordered invasion plans for 2024, you know, or, or, or even 2027. Um, so I'm pretty confident that's not the case. And so then it becomes more about an analytic framework. And I, from what I can tell, it's seems to be largely based on what, uh, in, you know, the intelligence community we would call calendar-int.. calendar intelligence. In other words, you know, over the next 18 months, a lot of stuff's going to happen. We're gonna have our midterm elections next week. It's pretty likely the Republicans get at least one chamber of Congress, maybe both.That would suggest that things like the Taiwan Policy Act and, you know, really, uh, things that have, uh, Beijing's undies in a bunch, uh, you know, could really come back on, uh, the radar pretty forcibly and pretty quickly. Obviously Taiwan, nobody talks about it, but Taiwan's having municipal elections around the same time, and normally that would be a very inside Taiwan baseball affair, nobody would care. But the way that KMT ooks like they will not perform, I should say,  in those municipal elections. They could be effectively wiped out, you know, as a, as a sort of electable party in Taiwan. That's not a good news story for Beijing.And then of course we have our own presidential in 2024 and Taiwan has a presidential election in 24 in the US case.I mean, look, we could end up with a President Pompeo, right? Or a President DeSantis or others who. Been out there sort of talking openly about Taiwan independence and recognizing Taiwan. And similarly, I think whoever succeeds, uh, President Tsai in Taiwan, if we assume it will likely be a a, a Democratic Progressive party president, will almost by definition be more independence oriented.So I think the administration is saying there's a lot of stuff that's gonna get the Chinese pretty itchy, you know, over this next 18 month period. So therefore we need to be really loud in our signaling to deter. Right. And okay. But I think there's a risk with that as well, which they don't seem to be acknowledging, which is you might create a self-fulfilling prophecy.I mean, frankly, that's what really troubles me about the rhetoric. And so, for example, when Secretary Blinken last week or the before came out and said  Yeah, you know, the, the, the Chinese have given up on the status quo. I, I, I've seen nothing, you know, that would suggest that the political report doesn't suggest. Bill: They have called it a couple of times  so-called status quo.Chris: Well, Fair enough. Yeah. Okay. That's, that's fine. Um, but I think if we look at the reason why they're calling it the so-called status quo, it's because it's so called now because the US has been moving the goalposts on the status quo.Yeah. In terms of erosion of the commitment to the one China policy. And the administration can say all at once, they're not moving the goal post, but they are, I mean, let's just be honest.Bill: Now, and they have moved it more than the Trump administration did, don't you think?Chris: Absolutely. Yeah. Um, you know, no president has said previously we will defend Taiwan  multiple times. Right. You know, um, and things like, uh, you know, Democracy, someone, I mean, this comes back also to the, the framing, right, of one of the risks I think of framing the relationship as democracy versus autocracy is that it puts a very, uh, heavy incentive then for the Biden administration or any future US administration to, you know, quote unquote play the Taiwan card, right, as part of said competition.Whereas if you don't have that framing, I don't think that's necessarily as automatic. Right? In other words, if that's the framing, well Taiwan's a democracy, so we have to lean in. Right? You know? Whereas if it's a more say, you know, straight realist or national interest driven foreign policy, you might not feel that in every instance you've gotta do that,Bill: No, and and I it, that's an interesting point. And I also think too that, um, I really do wonder how much Americans care, right? And, and whether or not we're running the risk of setting something up or setting something in motion that, you know, again, it's easy to be rhetorical about it, but that we're frankly not ready to deal withChris: Well, and another thing that's interesting, right, is that, um, to that point, Some of the administration's actions, you know, that are clearly designed to show toughness, who are they out toughing? You know, in some cases it feels like they're out toughing themselves, right? I mean, obviously the Republicans are watching them and so on and all of that.Um, but you know, interesting, uh, something that came across my thought wave the other day that I hadn't really considered. We're seeing pretty clear indications that a Republican dominated Congress after the midterms may be less enthusiastic about support to Ukraine, we're all assuming that they're gonna be all Taiwan support all the time.Is that a wrong assumption? You know, I mean, in other words, Ukraine's a democracy, right? And yet there's this weird strain in the Trumpist Wing of the Republican party that doesn't wanna spend the money. Right. And would that be the case for Taiwan as well? I don't know, but you know, the point is, I wonder if the boogieman of looking soft is, is sort of in their own heads to some degree.And, and even if it isn't, you know, sometimes you have to lead. Bill: it's not clear the allies are listening. It doesn't sound like the Europeans would be on board withChris: I think very clearly they're not. I mean, you know, we're about to see a very uncomfortable bit of Kabuki theater here, aren't we? In the next couple of days with German Chancellor Sholz going over and, um, you know, if you, uh, read the op-ed he wrote in Politico, you know, it's, it's painful, right? You can see him trying to, uh, Trying to, uh, you know, straddle the fence and, and walk that line.And, and obviously there are deep, deep divisions in his own cabinet, right? You know, over this visit, the foreign minister is publicly criticizing him, you know, and so on. So I think this is another aspect that might be worrisome, which is the approach. You know, my line is always sort of a stool, if it's gonna be stable, needs three legs, right.And on US-China relations, I think that is, you know, making sure our own house is in order. Domestic strengthening, these guys call it, coordinating with allies and partners, certainly. But then there's this sort of talking to the Chinese aspect and through a policy, what I tend to call strategic avoidance, we don't.Talk to them that much. So that leg is missing. So then those other two legs need to be really strong. Right. Um, and on domestic strengthening, Okay. Chips act and so on, that's good stuff. On allies and partners, there seems to be a bit of an approach and I think the chip restrictions highlight this of, look, you're either for us or against us.Right? Whereas I think in, you know, the good old Cold War I, we seem to be able to understand that a West Germany could do certain things for us vis-a-vis the Soviets and certain things they couldn't and we didn't like it and we complained, but we kind of lived with it, right? If we look at these chip restrictions, it appears the administration sort of said, Look, we've been doing this multilateral diplomacy on this thing for a year now, it's not really delivering the goods. The chips for framework is a mess, so let's just get it over with and drag the allies with us, you know? Um, and we'll see what ramifications that will have.Bill: Well on that uplifting note, I, I think I'm outta questions. Is there anything else you'd like to add?Chris: Well, I think, you know, something just to consider is this idea, you know, and maybe this will help us close on a more optimistic note. Xi Jinping is telling us, you know, he's hardening the system, he's, he's doing this fortress economy thing and so on. But he also is telling us, I have a really difficult set of things I'm trying to accomplish in this five years.Right? And that may mean a desire to signal to the us let's stabilize things a bit, not because he's having a change of heart or wants a fundamental rapprochement, so on and so forth. I don't think that's the case, but might he want a bit of room, right? A breathing room. Bill: Buy some time, buy some spaceChris: Yeah, Might he want that? He might. You know, and so I think then a critical question is how does that get sorted out in the context of the negotiations over the meeting in Bali, if it is a longer meeting, I think, you know, so that's encouraging for that. Right. To some degree. I, I, I would say, you know, if we look at what's just happened with the 20th party Congress and we look at what's about to happen, it seems with our midterms here in the United States, Who's the guy who's gonna be more domestically, politically challenged going into this meeting, and therefore have less room to be able to seize that opportunity if it does exist.Exactly. Because I, I think, you know, the, the issue is, The way I've been framing it lately, you know, supposedly our position is the US position is strategic competition and China says, look, that's inappropriate, and we're not gonna sign onto it and forget it.You know, my own view is we kind of have blown past strategic competition where now in what I would call strategic rivalry, I think the chip restrictions, you know, are, are a giant exclamation point, uh, under that, you know, and so on. And my concern is we're kind of rapidly headed toward what I would call strategic enmity.And you know, that all sounds a bit pedantic, but I think that represents three distinct phases of the difficulty and the relationship. You know, strategic enmity is the cold, the old Cold War, what we had with the Soviets, right? So we are competing against them in a brass tax manner across all dimensions. And if it's a policy that, you know, hurts us, but it hurts them, you know, 2% more we do it, you know, kind of thing. I don't think we're there yet. And the meeting offers an opportunity to, you know, arrest the travel from strategic rivalry to strategic enmity. Let's see if there's something there/Bill: And if, and if we don't, if it doesn't arrest it, then I think the US government at least has to do a much better job of explaining to the American people why we're headed in this direction and needs  to do a much better job with the allies cuz because again, what I worry about is we're sort of heading down this path and it doesn't feel like we've really thought it through.You know, there are lots of reasons  be on this path, but there's also needs to be a much more of a comprehensive understanding of the, of the costs and the ramifications and the solutions and have have an actual sort of theory of the case about how we get out the other side of this in a, in a better way.Chris: Yeah, I think that's important. I want to be real, um, fair to the administration. You know, they're certainly more thoughtful and deliberative than their predecessor. Of course, the bar was low, but, um, you know, they, they seem to approach these things in a pretty. Dedicated and careful manner. And I think they really, you know, take, take things like, uh, looking at outbound investment restrictions, you know, my understanding is they have been, you know, seeking a lot of input about unintended consequences and so on. But then you look at something like the chips piece and it just seems to me that those in the administration who had been pushing for, you know, more there for some time, had a quick moment where they basically said, look, this thing's not working with multilaterally, Let's just do it, you know? And then, oh, now we're seeing the second and third and other order consequences of it. And the risk is that we wind up, our goal is to telegraph unity to Beijing and shaping their environment around them as the administration calls it. We might be signaling our disunity, I don't know, with the allies, and obviously that would not be a good thingBill: That's definitely a risk. Well, thanks Chris. It's always great to talk to you and Thank you for listening to the occasional Sinocism podcast. Thank you, Chris.Chris: My pleasure. Sinocism is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit sinocism.com/subscribe

Alors que Xi Jinping vient de voir son mandat renouvelé lors du XXe Congrès national du Parti communiste chinois, il continue d'affirmer la volonté chinoise de (ré)atteindre la place de numéro un mondial. La robuste montée en puissance chinoise semble inarrêtable et Pékin devrait à terme dépasser Washington, a minima sur le plan économique. Mal à l'aise face à l'invasion russe de l'Ukraine, Pékin ne soutient pas militairement Moscou sans pour autant condamner l'intervention russe. Le pays resserre par ailleurs son étau autour de Taïwan avec laquelle les tensions ont été ravivées depuis la visite sur l'île de la Secrétaire d'État américaine Nancy Pelosi l'été dernier. De son côté, la Russie semble s'enliser dans le conflit ukrainien et est coupée, pour longtemps, de toute relation avec les Occidentaux et singulièrement les Européens. Guerre en Ukraine, rivalité sino-américaine, tensions entre Pékin et Taïpei… Pékin et Moscou sont au cœur des enjeux stratégiques de ces derniers mois. Le dépassement économique des États-Unis par la Chine est-il inéluctable ? L'hypothèse d'une annexion de force de Taïwan par la Chine est-elle plausible ? Quelle relation entretiennent aujourd'hui Moscou et Pékin ? Que représente l'enjeu du conflit en Ukraine pour Vladimir Poutine et la Russie ? Dans quelle mesure les pays Baltes ont-ils fait barrage à la mise en place d'un dialogue avec le Kremlin ? Dans ce podcast, Sylvie Bermann, ancienne ambassadrice de France à Pékin, Londres et Moscou, propose à travers ses différentes expériences au sein de la diplomatie française, une analyse des défis géopolitiques auxquels sont confrontées la Chine et la Russie. De la rivalité sino-américaine à les accords de Minsk, en passant par le Brexit et les soubresauts de la politique étrangère et de sécurité commune de l'UE, elle témoigne des événements qui ont marqué sa vie de diplomate à l'occasion de la parution de son ouvrage "Madame l'ambassadeur - De Pékin à Moscou, une vie de diplomatie", Éd. Taillandier (2022). Pour aller plus loin :

Le conflit russo-ukrainien est venu replacer les États-Unis au centre de l'échiquier mondial, éclipsant la débâcle de Washington en Afghanistan d'août 2021. L'invasion de l'Ukraine par la Russie est en effet venue renforcer l'OTAN et à amener davantage les pays européens à se tourner vers Washington au nom de l'axe des démocraties contre l'axe des pays autoritaires, à défaut d'être venue consolider une autonomie stratégique européenne encore trop balbutiante. Mais le non-alignement des pays du Sud sur les sanctions occidentales prises à l'égard de Moscou vient contrarier la suprématie américaine. Aussi, peut-on affirmer que les États-Unis sont réellement de retour ? La guerre en Ukraine constitue-t-elle un effet d'aubaine pour les États-Unis d'un point de vue géopolitique ? Comment les États-Unis perçoivent-ils le non-alignement de la majorité des pays du Sud sur les sanctions occidentales à l'égard de Moscou ? Quid des relations franco-américaines dans ce contexte ? Tour d'horizon sur la politique étrangère américaine avec Gérard Araud, diplomate et ancien ambassadeur de France aux États-Unis, à l'occasion de la parution de son ouvrage "Histoires diplomatiques – Leçons d'hier pour le monde d'aujourd'hui" (éditions Grasset, 2022). Pour aller plus loin :

William chats with Matthew McLennan about how to achieve resilient wealth creation, which is a central focus of William's book “Richer, Wiser, Happier." This interview was recorded on August 30, 2022.IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN:02:36 - How Matthew McLennan grew up off the grid without electricity or hot running water.12:56 - What he learned as a money manager at Goldman Sachs during the dotcom bubble.15:57 - Why investors should try to emulate the patient, selective mindset of gardeners.27:01 - How the most resilient businesses remind Matt of great wines and enduring artworks.35:01 - Why investors need to respect the phenomenon of entropy as an ironclad law of life.44:18 - Why investors should be wary of hot growth stocks, which are liable to fade.46:27 - Why there's surprising beauty in mundane businesses like bicycle brakes & elevators.57:14 - How to ask the right “splitting” questions as a way to rule out what you shouldn't own.1:07:07 - Why gold might be more attractive than Bitcoin as a potential hedge against chaos. 1:18:25 - Why it's wise to diversify overseas, where many stocks are much cheaper than in the US. 1:23:33 - Why the high-flying US dollar is at risk of weakening in the years to come. 1:32:59 - Why Matt is wary of Chinese stocks & thinks China's ascendancy is not inevitable. 1:37:17 - What history can teach us about the growing risk of war between the US & China.1:38:52 - Why it's critical to set aside time to read, reflect, & distill what you're learning. *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences.BOOKS AND RESOURCESWebsite for First Eagle Investments.Fred Schwed's classic book, Where Are the Customers' Yachts?History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides.Hendrik Bessembinder's study of wealth creation in US stocks from 1926-2019.William Green's book, “Richer, Wiser, Happier” – read the reviews of this book.Follow William Green on Twitter.NEW TO THE SHOW?Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs.Browse through all our episodes (complete with transcripts) here.Try our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool.Enjoy exclusive perks from our favorite Apps and Services.P.S The Investor's Podcast Network is excited to launch a subreddit devoted to our fans in discussing financial markets, stock picks, questions for our hosts, and much more! 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This week, the guys are joined by Assumption University's own BJ Dobski. The group discuss Thucydides as a source of ancient history, the extent to which he is reliable, and the archaeology surrounding him personally.

Who knew that Thucydides had wise words to say about the duty to call out your friends when they're out of order, or to support the Christian condemnation of public festivals?

Một số nhà phân tích, dẫn nhận định của Thucydides cho rằng Chiến tranh Peloponnese xuất phát từ nỗi sợ hãi của Sparta về một Athens đang trỗi dậy, tin rằng quan hệ Mỹ - Trung đang bước vào thời kỳ xung đột giữa một bá quyền cũ với một quốc gia thách thức ngày càng trỗi dậy mạnh mẽ. Xem thêm.

Connaissez-vous notre site ? www.lenouvelespritpublic.frUne émission de Philippe Meyer, enregistrée au studio l'Arrière-boutique le 9 septembre 2022.Avec cette semaine :Béatrice Giblin, directrice de la revue Hérodote et fondatrice de l'Institut Français de Géopolitique.Nicole Gnesotto, vice-présidente de l'Institut Jacques Delors.Marc-Olivier Padis, directeur des études de la fondation Terra Nova.Richard Werly, correspondant à Paris du quotidien helvétique Blick. REFONDATION NÉCESSAIRE ? CONCERTATION POSSIBLE ?Le président de la République a lancé jeudi, à Marcoussis dans l'Essonne, le Conseil national de la refondation (CNR), symbole de sa « nouvelle méthode » : le dialogue. Selon l'Élysée, « il s'agit de revivifier notre démocratie et faire face à d'immenses défis », de « recréer la confiance ». Le Haut-Commissaire au Plan et principal allié de LREM François Bayrou (MoDem) en est le secrétaire général. Parmi les thèmes abordés figurent le plein emploi, l'école, la santé, le bien-vieillir et la transition écologique. Destiné à réunir acteurs politiques, syndicats, associations et citoyens pour réfléchir aux grands sujets du moment, le CNR est qualifié de « bidule macroniste » par Bruno Retailleau, président du groupe Les Républicains au Sénat, d'« objet politique non identifié », par le sénateur socialiste Patrick Kanner ou de « saison 2 du bla-bla » par le leader de La France insoumise, Jean-Luc Mélenchon. De LR au Rassemblement national en passant par les Verts, les « insoumis », les socialistes et les communistes, tous ont fait savoir qu'ils boycotteraient les discussions. Même l'ancien Premier ministre, Edouard Philippe sera absent. Le président (LR) du Sénat, Gérard Larcher redoute que le CNR ne vise à contourner le Parlement. D'autres soulignent une instance à faible valeur ajoutée au regard du Conseil économique, social et environnemental (CESE). Même si l'Élysée martèle qu'« il s'agit d'une méthode de concertation, et non d'une nouvelle structure ou institution ». En revanche, les principales associations d'élus ont finalement accepté de participer à son lancement après avoir obtenu des réunions régulières avec Emmanuel Macron. Le Medef, La CFDT, la CFE-CGC et la CFTC ont également répondu à l'invitation.L'idée, de ce CNR avait été lancée par Emmanuel Macron juste avant les élections législatives de juin dernier. Le « clin d'œil » au Conseil national de la résistance est assumé. Fondé par Jean Moulin en 1943, il avait adopté en 1944 un programme pour relever la France anéantie par l'occupation nazie. Un programme qui dessinait notamment les contours de l'État-providence. Regroupant tous les mouvements politiques de la Résistance intérieure, ce fut un moment rare d'union nationale avant que la politique et ses divisions ne reprenne ses droits en 1947. « Nous vivons un temps comparable, a assuré Emmanuel Macron. Nous sommes dans une ère historique qui impose de changer profondément de modèle et puis la guerre est là ».La journée de jeudi a démarré par un état de la situation du pays : une présentation des finances publiques par Pierre Moscovici, président de la Cour des comptes, de l'économie par François Villeroy de Galhau, gouverneur de la Banque de France, et des enjeux climatiques par Corinne Le Quéré, présidente du Haut Conseil pour le climat. Pour François Bayrou « ce qui est en jeu, c'est notre vie pour les années qui viennent et nos raisons de vivre pour les années qui viennent ».***TENSIONS À TAÏWANLa tension est montée d'un cran début août, après à la visite à Taïwan de la présidente américaine de la Chambre des représentants, Nancy Pelosi. En représailles, l'armée chinoise a lancé d'importantes manœuvres militaires, allant jusqu'à simuler un blocus de Taïwan. Le Parti communiste chinois s'insurge contre toute action diplomatique susceptible de conférer une légitimité à Taïwan et réagit avec une agressivité croissante aux visites de responsables occidentaux.L'élection à Taïwan, en 2016, de la démocrate Tsai Ing-wen plus souverainiste que son prédécesseur du Kouomintang traditionnellement ouvert à la Chine, a grandement mécontenté le président chinois Xi Jing Ping. Selon le dernier sondage d'opinion réalisé en juin 2022, seul 2% de la population taïwanaise est favorable à une réunification de l'île et du continent. Xi Jing Ping doit soigner sa stature d'homme fort avant le 20ème Congrès du PCC à l'automne et une session plénière de l'Assemblée nationale populaire en 2023 où il devrait briguer un troisième mandat présidentiel de cinq ans. Selon lui, l'« unification » avec Taïwan est une priorité qui « ne peut être laissée aux générations futures ». Le 10 août, Pékin a publié un Livre blanc consacré à Taïwan, le premier depuis 2000, et « le plus ferme jamais écrit » contre l'indépendance de l'île, d'après le journal nationaliste pékinois Huanqiu Shibao. Le spectre d'un conflit armé opposant Pékin et Taipei plane sur le détroit de Formose depuis 70 ans, lorsque les troupes nationalistes du Kuomintang se sont installées sur l'île, fuyant l'avancée des communistes de Mao.En 2022, Taïwan a porté son budget militaire à un niveau record, près de 15 milliards de dollars, mais selon le think-tank américain Council on Foreign Relations, « les dépenses de la Chine seraient environ vingt-deux fois supérieures à celles de Taïwan ». L'armée chinoise, l'Armée populaire de libération compte plus de deux millions d'hommes et de femmes d'active, dont près d'un million rattachés à l'armée de terre, à quoi s'ajoutent 500.000 paramilitaires mobilisables et 500.000 réservistes. En comparaison, l'armée taïwanaise aligne 169.000 militaires d'active, mais peut compter sur près de 1,66 million de réservistes, selon le rapport 2022 de l'International Institute for Strategic Studies. Début septembre, la Chine a demandé aux Etats-Unis de renoncer « immédiatement » à la vente, pour 1,1 milliard de dollars d'armes à Taïwan menaçant dans le cas contraire de prendre des « contre-mesures ».Traditionnellement, les Etats-Unis avaient adopté une position d'« ambiguïté stratégique » consistant à ne pas dire clairement s'ils défendraient Taïwan en cas d'attaque chinoise. Mais depuis deux ans le président Joe Biden a affirmé à plusieurs reprises que son pays défendrait l'île si la Chine l'attaquait.Le piège de Thucydide, qui veut qu'une puissance dominante soit souvent poussée à entrer en guerre avec une puissance émergente, va-t-il se refermer sur les Etats-Unis et la Chine ?Vous pouvez consulter notre politique de confidentialité sur https://art19.com/privacy ainsi que la notice de confidentialité de la Californie sur https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

The failures of radical democracy! In this episode, we look at Chapter 1 of Alan Ryan's On Politics, beginning with the emergence and rule of Athenian radical democracy. We look at the origins of the Greek city-state, the functioning of the Athenian Assembly, the Persian and Peloponnesian Wars, the Trial of Socrates, and more! We also break down why the Athenian democracy ultimately failed and why it might not be the best idea to praise radical democracy as a great political system. We're also planning a future giveaway, so be sure to follow us on Twitter @UlmtdOpinions for more upcoming details!

The History of the Peloponnesian War by Thucydides audiobook. The History of the Peloponnesian War is an account of the Peloponnesian War in Ancient Greece, fought between the Peloponnesian League (led by Sparta) and the Delian League (led by Athens) in the 5th Century BC. It was written by Thucydides, an Athenian general who served in the war. It is widely considered a classic and regarded as one of the earliest scholarly works of history. The History is divided into eight books. These book divisions are the work of editors in later antiquity.

Launching from a discussion of the Melian Dialogue in Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, Laurie Johnson discusses how the extravagant figure Alcibiades factored in to Athens eventual demise. The Melians' warnings were not heard during the dialogue, but they were felt as Athens was lured into disaster by this most fascinating charismatic character. … More Love and Betrayal Brings Down Ancient Athens (Thucydides 7)

PGP 08/10/22 My wonderful life, lol The secret to happiness is freedom, the secret to freedom is courage. Thucydides was a Greek philosopher from 2500 years ago.

Most historians are quick to acknowledge the historical credibility of the works of Herodotus or Thucydides or Julius Caesar's invasion of Gaul. How does the Bible's reliability stack up against these? The evidence is overwhelming: the Bible is the most well-attested ancient document we have.Resources:"Evidence That Demands a Verdict: Life-Changing Truth for a Skeptical World" - Josh McDowell & Sean McDowell, PhD"The New Testament Documents: Are They Reliable?" - F. F. Bruce