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Hello again friends.

I'm Jason Edens, your host of Lakeland Currents.

Thanks for joining the conversation today and thanks for your ongoing support of Lakeland Public TV.

As many of you know, the Rosenmeier Forum based at Central Lakes College right here in Brainerd facilitates important conversations about the most pressing public policy issues of our time by inviting speakers from around the state and beyond.

This week, it's my privilege to introduce the forum's next speaker.

Mr. Tom Hanson on November 16th at Central Lakes College will be giving a talk entitled From Afghanistan to China, the first nine months of the Biden presidency.

I'm fortunate enough to give you a sneak peak.

Mr. Hanson, thank you so much for making time for our conversation today and welcome to the program.

Jason, thanks very much.

Thank you for inviting me.

I'm very happy to have a chance to speak about the program and the Rosenmeier Forum.

So, thank you so much.

Absolutely.

Well first of all, what makes you an authority on this topic?

Can you tell us a little bit about your background?

Of course.

Yeah, I'm from Minnesota and went to the U.

Got interested in foreign affairs through travel in Europe during my undergrad years and went to graduate school and then took the foreign service exam to join the U.S. state department where I spent about 25 years on various postings mainly in Europe.

And, subsequently worked in the Senate and House of Representatives on the foreign affairs committees and then had a position at the Atlantic Council of the United States, which is a think tank in Washington D.C.

So, I guess I've had a kind of a varied background both State Department, Congress and then kind of in the institute world.

And, so since then I'm back in Minnesota here.

I am a Diplomat in Residence at the University of Minnesota Duluth at the Alworth Institute there.

Have done some teaching of Diplomacy at Carleton College and head up a couple of organizations in the Twin Cities devoted to global affairs.

So, it's kind of a scattered background but somewhat varied and I think for students, I spend a lot of time with students, of course.

Having a little bit of practical experience in the world of diplomacy probably is an asset because I can advise them on things like internships or international careers which I think some students need that kind of guidance in their college years.

Absolutely.

Well, I'm personally looking forward to your presentation and I want to dig right into that.

Let's start with China, both the People's Republic of China as well as the Republic of China otherwise known as Taiwan.

China considers Taiwan to be a breakaway province and is rather overt about its intentions to potentially take it back.

The United States, however, with regard to Taiwan follows a policy known as strategic or deliberate ambiguity.

What does that mean and what would President Biden do if China were to invade Taiwan?

Well, that's a very interesting question.

You know, just this past week on CNN when asked directly if the United States would come to to Taiwan's defense militarily, he said yes we have a commitment to do that which is less ambiguous than the policy has been and actually the State Department had to walk back Biden's words.

So, our strategic ambiguity has become even more ambiguous at this point.

The basic problem is this - for China Taiwan is the final one of the final parts of the Chinese historic territory that they want to take back.

They feel that, you know, it's an unresolved civil war from the late 1940's.

The U.S pretty much intervened right at the end of that war to prevent the mainland China, the communist government there from taking over Taiwan and it's been a kind of a block situation ever since.

Now in the interim, Taiwan has emerged as a democracy and obviously a flourishing economy.

It's the center of the global chip industry and in addition demographically, the Chinese coming over from the mainland after 1949 now are aging and the Indigenous population of Taiwan now is by far the majority and they have always wanted independence and so they are inching more and more toward making clear that they would like to stay independent especially after the whole Hong Kong tragedy, where they see what happened when Hong Kong became part of China.

So it is a tense situation.

I think it's one of the real flash points, something that could easily get out of control and there's a lot of pressure on the U.S side to give increasing symbolic commitment to China, to Taiwan.

The problem is that if it did come to a conflict, at this point I think our conventional forces out there are not up to the Chinese.

They have weapon systems now that can knock out our aircraft carriers and so it's very hard to see how exactly we would defend Taiwan without a major escalation, potentially toward nuclear weapons and so that's the danger and I'm confident that both sides will keep this within bounds.

Although, for the moment, it's very tense, also after Biden's recent statement.

So, we'll see.

I want to ask you one more thing about strategic ambiguity.

The president of Taiwan was recently interviewed and during that interview she acknowledged the presence of U.S. military personnel.

What's ambiguous about that?

Well, that's been sort of a known unknown shall we say.

I mean, my understanding is that most likely we have military advisors and trainers there.

That's basically because Taiwan has bought a lot of our military equipment, F-16 weapons, airplanes and such.

We're actually selling more and more arms to Taiwan and so I think a lot of our presence has to do with training.

And, I think the Chinese have always known about this.

It's just that now, it's been officially acknowledged and it's an example how they the leadership in Taiwan, now Tsai Ing-wen and her party are willing to take to take little steps in the direction of more independence and on our side we're doing the same.

We have been, there were high level visits to Taiwan during the Trump administration which the Chinese complained about and Joe Biden invited the Taiwanese representative in Washington to his inauguration.

That's never happened before.

So, as I said there's been a sort of symbolic escalation on both sides and more and more military presence.

Our aircraft carrier groups are sailing in the Taiwan area.

Chinese overflights are increasing.

I think if there were to be an escalation, it might take the form of China seizing a few small Taiwanese islands, especially the Pratas Islands to the south of Taiwan, where the Chinese have been having of invading Taiwan but would send a very strong signal.

Something similar happened in the 1950's when the Communist Chinese seized Quemoy and Matsu which were two, this is a long time ago but that was a big issue in the 50's.

Once again, two islands.

So, hopefully, it won't get to that point but it's a worrying situation.

And, along with Kashmir, I think is the other real potential flash point for conflict.

I think Ukraine less.

I think that is a frozen conflict but Taiwan is a serious issue.

Well, given the fact that you worked at the U.S State Department, I actually wanted to ask you about something that you've already mentioned which was the fact that President Biden recently said to Taiwan, essentially but unequivocally, we've got your back.

Shortly thereafter, both the White House and the U.S. State Department had to walk that back.

Yes.

Who speaks for President Biden?

I don't understand why that was walked back.

Well, yeah, it is, I mean within the Taiwan Relations Act, there is specific language about the U.S. supporting Taiwan's defense.

It does not say that, straight out, this is the way the ambiguity comes from, that we would defend militarily in the case of an attack.

So, I think that Biden, he misspoke.

Quite frankly, he misspoke.

I think that he sanctioned the walk back.

I think he realized that he misspoke but for outside observers, I mean your question is very good but who do we trust here?

The president says something, it's walked back at a low level.

What really is the policy?

And, as I say this is ambiguous ambiguity that we're involved in here and this is you know, as China is emerging as a major, what we call peer competitor.

They are having some very striking breakthroughs in technology, in Quantum, Artificial Intelligence, Hypersonic Weaponry.

All of these things have military implications.

So, it's not the 1950's anymore.

This is a different different situation with China.

So, I think cooler heads will prevail.

I don't think either the U.S. or China wants a major escalation but it'll remain a source of tension and I might just add to this that the United States is saying to China now, that we're going to confront on certain issues and that's where Taiwan comes in.

We're going to compete on certain issues and we'll cooperate on some.

So, it's almost like an a la carte approach.

So, we are trying to get them to cooperate closely with us on climate even as we are kind of escalating at least the ambiguity onTaiwan and the Chinese are saying no this is not a la carte.

If we have overall bad relations, you cannot expect us to cooperate on things like climate change and we're seeing that.

In the run-up to the Paris agreement, China and the U.S. cooperated closely, signed a major agreement between themselves that made the Paris success possible.

This time the dialogue is broken down.

Kerry is getting very little time.

Xi Jinping is not even going to Cop26.

So, I think a price is being paid in dealing with these larger issues because of the overall deterioration of the relationship.

Well, the last question I have about China is whether or not President Biden has inadvertently stumbled into the cold war and if so what are some of the biggest threats that we have in our future?

Well, I, you know, as I look at the at the general background of the global situation right now which of course is very disrupted by COVID and by a lot of other issues.

I think there are five basic challenges or you might even say trade-offs that we, are of a major concern and that may be amount to a threat.

Now I'll try to list them quickly.

First of all, between stimulus, stimulating our economies and the debt the, unbelievable debt, that we are are amassing right now, it's been going on since 2008 and the crisis.

Major countries, the EU, China, Japan with Albionomics and the U.S with Quantitative Easing have simply been pouring money into the economy, trying for a lack of demand and now with COVID we're doing even more and at some point this is not going to work anymore and China already is starting to act to try to get their debt down.

But, this contradiction is going to be huge for the economies going forward.

Second, I think there's a trade-off and maybe a contradiction between the new technologies that we are now developing and democracy.

I hate to say this, but we were so optimistic about the internet and the digital world even 10 years ago.

I think that it's morning after now and a lot of people are saying, seeing that technologies don't necessarily reinforce democracy and the Chinese are convinced that their system will make better use of technology by controlling it through the state.

They want to achieve a harmonious society using the new technology.

So, this is a major trade-off.

The third one and we're seeing this right now, we want to move towards sustainable green energy but the costs in the short term are very high.

We got caught between two stools and so we're seeing this with the increase in gas prices, all kinds of disruptions now, as it's probably caused by COVID and by the supply chain crunch but people are realizing now that this transition will be difficult and it's going to affect the middle and lower class especially and so we risk having the electorate turn against green reform that has happened in France recently.

So, how we get to sustainability and yet get through this period where energy costs will rise and then the last two are along the lines of your questions.

This competition with China, we want to remain predominant in Asia because we believe if any country becomes what they call a peer competitor and dominates its region, it could become a threat to us just as Nazi Germany and Japan were in World War II.

So, we're bound and determined to prevent that from happening and Taiwan is a key part of that strategy.

China wants to bring Taiwan back in and create strategic depth in its, just like we had a Monroe Doctrine.

This is a major confrontation of two foreign policies and then the final one and it flows from the fourth one.

Because of this great power competition, how are we going to meet the shared global threats that we all face?

And, that's what we discussed earlier about climate change.

Yeah, I'm afraid that the geopolitical competition is going to make it more and more difficult to meet what I think are the real threats of climate change, pandemics that sort of thing.

I mean to my mind, the geopolitical squabbles pale in comparison to those threats.

So, we're going to need situational awareness on these issue, it seems to me, to keep things on the rails going forward.

So, those are the challenges I see.

Well, let's turn our attention to the other book end of your presentation at the Rosenmeier Forum on November 16th which is Afghanistan.

Yeah.

What was accomplished in America's longest war?

You know, Jason, I hate to say this but there's a bipartisan consensus in Washington that our decisions after 911 amounted to an enormous strategic mistake.

I don't think there's anybody in Washington that disagrees with that now.

It was under the Trump administration in 2017 that our new national security strategy was unveiled.

James Mattis rolled it out and the basic idea was that we had been on a mistaken path since 911.

We were asleep at the switch as China was rising.

We had focused our attention in the wrong area middle east and it was very, this is why my talk is called From Afghanistan to China.

It's important now to get to undo these commitments in Afghanistan and Iraq and make our full attention focused on great power competition.

It was a very striking document and the Biden administration has exactly the same assessment.

So, you know, it was Trump who in February 2020 signed the deal with the Taliban that would have us get out by May 1st.

All troops out and because the Taliban were threatening to attack our troops if we didn't.

They continued to attack the Afghan government troops but they left ours alone and so Biden inherited that and he was able to push it to August 31st but we know the result.

It was a very kind of tragic exit.

But, as I say both parties felt that we had to do this and now turn our attention to Russia and China, the countries that we believe are trying to undo, in our view, the the the international order to their benefit.

So, what did we accomplish in Afghanistan and Iraq?

I am afraid we can kind of fall silent frankly.

Well, you sort of alluded to this Mr. Hanson but Biden has been widely criticized for his handling of the ending of the mission in Afghanistan.

Will you hold the Biden administration responsible for the emerging humanitarian crisis there?

You know, it's this is tough.

It was a tough trade-off.

You know, once Trump, his administration signed that deal in February 2020, the French saw the writing on the wall and began getting their people out right away.

Now we criticized them for sending the wrong signal to the Afghan government of that we were going to cut and run.

You know, and so I think that we we hung in there longer so as not to panic people early and I think the Biden administration says that they expected the Ashraf Ghani administration to stay in Kabul even as the Taliban, you know, were kind of taking over the country to assure the transition.

But, Ghani fled.

He fled, we claim without our knowing it.

He just decided he saw what had happened to his predecessors and he got out and created a vacuum.

That's the argument that Washington is making but I think no matter it would have been messy at the end no matter what.

You know for the former ambassador, Russian ambassador in Kabul always would tell people - there are three reasons why we could never prevail in Afghanistan because the Soviets had had the same experience.

Number one - the Russians had never seen a country more adverse to foreign intervention and of course they even intervened in a lot of countries.

Number two - you never know who is who and this is a feudal clan based society and we didn't know that all these deals were being struck in the months before we left between the Taliban and local warlords.

It was all cooked, pre-cooked and we frankly didn't have the intelligence and that's the nature of Afghanistan.

And, then third - civilian casualties will doom your mission and of course our final act of leaving was a drone strike that killed a family of 10 which is right along those lines.

So, you know, the Europeans are pressing now for more recognition of the Taliban and free funds to that are in in Whether that's right or wrong, I don't know.

One of our chiefs of intelligence gave a presentation this week in which he said that IsisK, Isis Khorasan, the new, could be capable of striking the US homeland within six months.

Now they are growing in Afghanistan.

They're a problem for the Taliban.

The Taliban is trying to get them under control.

They're attacking Shia mosques in Afghanistan.

Now, Al-Qaeda is greatly weakened.

They can't really, according to our intelligence people, it would take a year or more for them to have those capacities.

So, it's a very uncertain situation and one final point going on too long here, but just in terms of what's coming.

After 911, the Russians were very helpful to us actually in Afghanistan.

They allowed us to use the northern supply route, starting in Russia going through central Asia.

They gave the green light on that right to the end.

They allowed us to open bases in Uzbekistan and in Kyrgyzstan which for the first part were very important.

This time the Russians are saying under no circumstances or in any form will there be a US military presence in central Asia and the Afghan government is saying the same thing.

So, the idea of an over the horizon capacity to go after terrorists, it's not clear how we're going to do that.

It'll be from a great distance because this time the Russians are not cooperating in letting us have, so it's, you know, I mean we're pivoting away but it's so uncertain we could get dragged back in in some form.

I don't think we'll send troops but, you know, it's still a very very unstable region.

Well, you've already mentioned climate change several times and I certainly want to discuss that as well.

According to the intergovernmental panel on climate change, the earth has already warmed 1.2 degrees celsius relative to pre-industrial times and of course the United Nations Climate Conference is starting on Sunday or Cop26.

Yes.

Yet Biden is attending almost empty-handed.

So, my question for you is - why is it that president Biden can't build consensus around a climate policy even within his own party?

Yeah.

It's a well, yes Jason, I mean you're exactly right.

You know the U.N.issued its code red report this year which was even more alarmist about how fast and we're seeing weather events happening faster than people had predicted as well.

So, you know, I hate to say this, but it kind of gets to the nature of our system with our separation of powers and the very powerful influence of lobbies.

In addition to which the the consciousness in the U.S. of the climate issue is way below other countries.

Yale University did a map of the U.S. showing the level of consciousness about climate change and compared to say a map of Europe along those lines, it was just night and day.

So, there's not as much public pressure here either as there is in some countries.

So, it makes it very difficult and you know if you take for example Obama when he made promises at the Paris agreement, anything that's regulatory as opposed to incentives to move toward green has a big problem in the U.S. We don't want to regulate business and in fact the Supreme Court knocked down everything that Obama had promised at Paris and people don't remember that but the Supreme Court ruled against his regulatory and of course the Supreme Court is even more conservative now and we did not dare to submit the Paris agreement as a treaty because there was not a two-thirds majority in the Senate to approve it, therefore it's not a treaty and therefore everything that Obama was able to do, he did by executive order.

An executive order can be undone by the next president and so of course Trump undid everything that Obama promised through executive order and so Biden faces the same problem now.

And, so anything regulatory has been kicked out of his Build Back Better.

It all it has to do with incentives.

There's gonna be 550 billion dollars for climate measures especially clean energy tax credits.

Once again, incentives.

Right you can't regulate this.

So, well it's all kinds of incentives but you know things like he had a big electricity performance program that got kicked out.

Anything to do with methane got kicked out.

So, he arrives in Glasgow not only empty-handed until this is actually passed back here, but with with other countries realizing this can all be undone by the next administration.

That it is, that is sort of will of the wisp and that's a larger problem for us because because we are so polarized.

Much is done by executive order now including foreign policy and we emerge as kind of a factor of uncertainty for a lot of countries.

You know, we're at the center of the world order we created in 1945 and yet we're being seen more and more as a kind of an unstable factor in global politics.

So, and final point on this and this gets into one of those five trade-offs I mentioned.

Many countries are going back to coal even as we speak.

Actually increasing their coal production given the the energy crunch right now and and the prices.

So, anyway, it's we're just going to have to soldier on here but I'm afraid that Glasgow will not be the success that Paris was.

Well, unfortunately we only have about a minute and a half left and I still have one more question about climate.

Which is how sincere is President Biden about climate mitigation policy because I recently read in the Associated Press and National Public Radio that the Biden administration is on track to issue more oil and gas leases on public and tribal land than any president since George W. Bush, So, is he being sincere about his commitment to climate change mitigation?

Well, I think he is.

I think, I know John Kerry is for sure, our climate envoy.

But, you know, he has so many domestic constituencies, you know, kind of harsh realities in Congress and even within his own party.

If you look at Joe Manchin, for example.

So, yeah it's, I think he's committed but I think his hands are tied here in many respects.

You know, there's a concept of greenwashing right?

People talk about whitewashing but so many promises are being made running up to Glasgow by hedge funds, by companies, by governments and for somebody like Greta Thunberg these are all just words and as far as she's concerned these are empty words.

In fact she's not even attending.

She's going there to join a protest outside.

So, once again a great contrast to the Paris agreement.

So, I think Biden is is personally aware of the crisis and is committed to doing something about it but our system, our current political situation poses so many restraints.

Well, with that Mr. Hanson, I have to tell you how much I'm looking forward to your presentation at the Rosenmeier Forum at Central Lakes College on November 16th at 7 pm and I want to thank you very much for making time for our conversation today.

Jason, thank you very much for inviting me and I hope to see a lot of you at the Rosenmeier.

Thanks so much.

Excellent and thank all of you for joining me once again.

I'm Jason Edens, your host of Lakeland Currents.

Be kind and be well.

We'll see you next week.