World War Four: Joe Biden and the Quadrilateral Alliance (India, Japan & Australia)

march 12th
2021 this morning like a bolt from the blue we learned joel biden's grand strategy not just for the politics of southeast asia not just for his diplomatic relations with india and china really his strategy to redraw the map of the world nobody thought he had it in him everyone imagined joe biden was going to be a status quo player who would change nothing or would revert from the um dangerous disastrous and unpredictable policies of donald trump to the more stalwart predictable boring policies of barack obama that is not the case at all um joe biden is probably going to be remembered like richard nixon as someone who had bold shocking new policies in the uh foreign relations department that changed forever the history of the world i cannot emphasize enough from a chinese perspective joe biden's declaration this morning is as shocking as the beginning of world war iv and wang yi china's main foreign relations minister the guy you always see on the news and the guy who flies around the world talking face to face with world leaders on china's behalf he's really the foreign minister for china wang yi has been on the phone with a long series of countries in europe austria switzerland and so on trying to reinforce the notion that the european union is going to continue to be china's trading partner and implicitly their political partner as china now seems will be cut off not just in the united states but from most of the rest of the world through kind of unbelievably powerful partnership between india australia japan and the united states the so-called quadrilateral alliance that is openly saying they are going to form a worldwide conspiracy that is pro-democracy and anti-dictatorship and very specifically anti-china right this is a big change it's important that i take a moment now to argue against my own position what if this fizzles out what if it comes to nothing what if it's indecisive what if it doesn't really matter okay barack obama dramatically announced his pivot to asia policy and that in some ways anticipated what's happening today but it completely fizzled out nothing decisive happened now joe biden lived through all that joe biden watched that unfold and you could look at the current situation say oh well maybe joe biden is going to do the same thing obama did he's going to make this announcement of a bold new policy on china and then nothing's going to happen that's that's what obama did there is every indication today that joe biden's attitude is not that he wants to emulate or imitate the failures of obama but that he has learned from that experience and he is very decisively moving to do something quite different from what obama ever did and indeed quite different from what donald trump ever did ultimately i mean trump's china policy it was incoherent it was unpredictable from one month to the next it was a vaguely anti-china policy primarily economic in terms of trade and trying to balance uh america's imports and exports and so there's different kind of impulses there um but you know this is joe biden taking a decisive step that nobody in the united states has taken certainly not since richard nixon set down the basis for the economic and political partnership between the united states and china what was called the strategic triangle sometimes referred to as the iron triangle now i'm gonna sneeze very broadly speaking it's important to remember american foreign policy it's partly rational but it's in large part sentimental why was bill clinton pro china in large part because the united states of america had been pro china since nixon if america's alliance with china made sense under richard nixon it certainly didn't make any sense at all under bill clinton right i mean fundamentally what nixon did was make an alliance with china against the russians and at that time the situation between china and russia was not a cold war it was a hot war the breakdown of the china-russia alliance because formerly under communism of course they had been allies and it got worse and worse and worse to the point where there was a massive russian army on the mongolian chinese border ready to invade china at all times several high-profile leaders in the chinese communist party defected to russia about chinese leaders running away to russia and then once they're in russia publishing lectures denouncing the communist government of china the whole government of mongolia who were on the russian side constantly denouncing the government of china as not being a legitimate congress government it was a hot war okay it was not a cold war what happened between uh russia and china and the chinese decided to get new alliance with the americans and the americans decided to get the lines of china against the russians and that was when mao zedong was still alive okay now that's as surreal as that may have been right if it made sense at that moment when nixon was the president united states and when mao zedong was leader of china then the berlin wall falls russia stops being a communist country right bill clinton becomes the president says what sense what sense does america's policy on china make what bill clinton is it makes no sense at all but it continued right so american foreign policy it's partly rational self-interest you know there's a lot of sentiment there an american sentiment in foreign policy it endures for decades after the original rationality created the alliance really briefly another example of that i would say is the united states and their relationship to turkey for decades and decades like anyone alive now as long as you can remember when did it make sense the relationship between the united states and turkey well back when kennedy was the president of the united states it seemed to make a lot of sense right it sure seemed to make sense uh you know after the bay of pigs and the cuban missile crisis and kennedy is in power in the united states it seemed then that america really needed this alliance with turkey again against russia uh to simplify under those cold war conditions but then as the decades go by what what what sense does it doesn't really make any sense so you know in economics you talk about a leading indicator and a lagging indicator america these policies don't change rapidly they change very very slowly now the big news today the quadrilateral alliance that america is entering into a strategic partnership frankly an anti-china conspiracy with japan india and australia that idea has been bandied about since abe shinzo was prime minister of japan the first time way back in 2007. uh for the most part since 2007 it wasn't a quadrilateral alliance the united states of america was interested but you were mostly looking at agreements between three countries just australia japan and india and even then it has sort of ebbed and flowed for one thing uh abbey shinzo was not continuously prime minister of japan he left and came back and another prime minister came and went was was prime minister rudd of australia rudd was a basically a pro-china leader of australia so australia's optimism and pessimism about china ebbed and flowed also but fundamentally at least on the level of naval cooperation worrying about you know control of the oceans there was this three-way partnership with the united states taking a very passive very cagey very detached role and that certainly continued down to and including barack obama in the so-called pivot to asia it deserves to be asked what was obama's perspective on the so-called quadrilateral alliance against china well i guess we'll never know and probably nobody cares but obama did nothing decisive one way or the other on this but it has sort of been a potential or actual anti-china alliance that has existed on paper now in terms of how terrifying it is for china ask yourself this if biden is now serious and they move ahead with this quadrilateral alliance what is thailand going to do what is mongolia going to do how about the philippines how about malaysia okay there were a whole lot of other potential political partners who will be more or less eager to jump on a pro-american anti-china bandwagon once this bad wagon gets rolling and that is terrifying to china and the quadrilateral alliance itself to begin with is terrifying but then what this is going to do for china's position in the whole of asia right is much much more threatening now the necessary background of this why didn't this happen earlier right one part has already been mentioned that actually the united states and china had an alliance dating back to nixon the less said about that the better i think for the purposes of this video the other is the history of america's war in afghanistan the most important and most ignored aspect of america's war in afghanistan was their partnership with pakistan a partnership that was in brief a disaster for the united states of america it was incredibly stupid it was incredibly short-sighted it's the wrong approach to the war in afghanistan i mean my point being here whether or not you would support america conquering afghanistan if you traveled back in time to the distant year of 2001 whether or not you thought that was a good idea in 2001 2002 2003 once you decide that you do want to conquer afghanistan how are you going to do it who are going to be your partners who are going to be your enemies and the united states decide to enter into a profound and intimate cooperation with pakistan and pakistan's secret service intelligence services intelligence agency however you want to put it right and it turns out that pakistan had its own agenda in afghanistan it turns out that in some ways pakistan's interests in afghanistan were compatible with those united states america but in some ways they were diametrically opposed they were totally incompatible and it was really ridiculous for the united states of america to become dependent on pakistan for its central asian policy because let's face it afghanistan isn't isolated it's part of central asia i mean you have to have a strategy for that whole part of the world how you're going to stabilize how you're going to normalize how are you going to modernize afghanistan you're going to bring afghanistan into the modern world and then as a consequence of that islam will become more moderate and more modern within afghanistan in as much as they cease to be an isolated pariah state and become connected to the outside world so um in as much as the united states of america was allied with and in a very tight military partnership with pakistan the united states had to be the enemy of india okay there was nothing positive possible for the united states and india jointly so long as the americans and pakistanis were in this alliance and now today again you don't have to have access to secret cia documents like in terms of the information that's publicly available today it's very easy to look back on america's alliance of pakistan and just totally regret it so this was the wrong george w bush was no genius what can i tell you whatever area whatever area of intellectual strength um george w bush had it wasn't central asian politics it wasn't south asian politics i mean it's worth pausing to consider just how little expertise and just how little interest anybody in the united states of america has in the politics of that part of the world um even at the elite levels of government even at the levels of people who have phds from princeton university how many people at princeton university have anything intelligent to say about the history of america's political relationship with pakistan at ameri american universities if you reflect on your own university for a moment and think about what was studied what was taught what was learned and what was ignored i think it is fair to say that at universities united states of america you might be able to take a course on the political relationship between the united states and latin america you might have a professor who gives lectures about the united states and its evol its involvement in wars in nicaragua its involvement in wars in colombia south america broadly speaking you might have some expertise in that universities here in there in america you would not be able to go into any university united states of america and find a department devoted to and people studying and people saying the next generation hey it's really important that you understand america's political relationship with pakistan this is can't even say it's forgotten or ignored expertise of this kind the united states really does not exist so that is how it was possible for america to stumble into this situation when did america's war in afghanistan end when did their partnership with pakistan and arguably it still isn't over right like right now it's still ongoing but at least under donald trump you can say he announced and declared the policy that trump was willing to make peace with the taliban he was willing to end america he attempted to end america's war in afghanistan it has at least been decreased in scale dramatically and thus ipso facto america's alliance with pakistan is finally coming to an end many years after it was discredited right now again in terms of people starting to ask questions with the alliance of pakistan you remember this guy named osama bin laden where was he when the americans found him when he was assassinated when he when he died right what was the involvement of uh pakistani intelligence service in locating osama bin laden there i mean there were a lot of questions about what pakistan's role in uh the afghan conflict were that were raised publicly and openly again without having access to secret ci information this started to be questioned at that time so it is only now that it becomes possible for the united states to really enter into a strategic partnership with india even though this idea of the quadrilateral alliance has been on the books since about 2007. america was totally dependent on pakistan to feed american troops in afghanistan just to land and transport food to their bases it was that deep a daily dependency on the government of pakistan all right and now we can say that is over or at least it is of a low enough priority that america can take on this new vision of its foreign policy in asia i was shocked when i heard this this morning um i was astonished and i was astounded certainly most of us assumed that joe biden was going to be an indecisive and ineffectual president who you know just returned us to the days of barack obama when bold pro when bold proclamations were made on every conceivable political topic but we could all rest assured that nothing was really going to change nothing was ever going to really happen both domestically and in terms of foreign policy you have to have some sensitivity to the chinese perspective on this issue what has been announced today is absolutely china's worst nightmare um this is a global conspiracy of all of the pro-democracy states including countries they have a land border with they're immediately adjacent surrounding and circling states including numerous countries they have you know an economic relationship with that's crucial to their normal daily functioning their economy you want to look up the value of trade just between china and japan you know and you know i think it's very telling that wang yi is on the phone to all these leaders in europe because just within the last two years the relationship between the european union and china has improved and improved it's become closer and tighter economically and uh politically but once you have this quadrilateral alliance in place i've already asked you well what do you think thailand is going to do do you think thailand is now going to become a pro-china country it's going to say that they want to support china and be in that circle and be opposed to india australia the united states so um we now get into a broader question of what's going to happen with the relationship between china and europe yes it's possible that europe the eu collectively and europe as a bunch of individual nations it's possible that the eu will become more committed to a pro-china position during 2020 europeans celebrated the opening of a train line that connected austria to china to from vienna to cn a continuous train line for the first time there are new train lines being built there are new highways being built part of the belton road initiative the opening of new harbors in both greece and italy that connect china to europe through trade europe and china have gotten cozy with one another just in the last two years new trade agreements and politically in every way europeans feel comfortable with the chinese in a way that australians don't right australia is now in a position where they regard even chinese immigrants with extreme suspicion and hostility as being part of a communist party plot to subvert democracy in australia right now of course there have been other flashpoints we have the still ongoing question of the political future of hong kong some people care about this some people don't it's it's an open question um sorry but i began this by digression by saying you have to have some uh sensitivity to china's position in this one of the fundamental differences between china and india is that china has no interest at all in expanding its land borders or expanding to become a larger empire than it already is whereas india actually is is interested in exactly that one of the reasons why india is a very difficult strategic partner to have is that india both in terms of the the masses and the political elite they are interested in conquering pakistan they are interested in either conquering or at least controlling countries like nepal and sri lanka india has a navy base that is due south of myanmar in the andaman islands when joe biden is talking about a democratic alliance to control the indo-pacific ocean to look at a map figure out how huge that area is of uh controlling the ocean going basically all the way from india to australia and then from australia to japan all right this is a grandiose plan for world domination that of course is greatly out of whack with the humble economic and military reality of what india is in the the 21st century joe biden also announced today that the world doesn't need china to provide them with vaccines that there would be a partnership between japan america and india with japanese money and japanese technical expertise and american scientists and american pharmaceutical corporations coming together to mass manufacture the vaccines in india not china to provide an enormous number of vaccines for india itself of course and for poorer countries in the third world directly competing with what china and russia are already doing as a goodwill gesture providing vaccines to poverty-driven countries around the world well guess what it's not just vaccines that can be made in india instead of china the cell phone you hold in your hands right now is made in china it could be made in india right the computer i'm recording this at is made in china but it could have been made in india right and nobody could be more keenly aware of this than the indians right so you could be talking about a massive economic shift towards favoring manufacturing and cheap labor frankly being centered in india with india as this kind of trading and manufacturing partner instead of china and very consciously intentionally to the exclusion of china that was certainly something that was talked about during the trump presidency but nobody really made it happen okay in this video by saying um there's an old feminist phrase you know the personal is political also stated as the political is personal of course i think nobody imagined just due to his demeanor perhaps nobody imagined that joe biden had been sitting through the whole of the obama presidency as the fiercest critic of everything obama was doing wrong nobody thought he was chomping at the bit to change the world and do things his way nobody thought he was sitting there watching obama's pivot to asia policy ineffectually rise and fall watching obama's promises to withdraw from afghanistan fade away and become instead of protracted commitments to keep on conquering and occupying afghanistan uh nobody thought that joe biden was sitting there looking at obama's political alliance with saudi arabia and thinking to himself if he were in power he would be doing everything 180 degrees different whether or not biden was already thinking about it back then whether or not the machinations began when he was vice president it is obvious that contrary to the expectation we had based on his demeanor based on his debates with bernie sanders joe biden came into office with an unbelievably hawkish and decisive policy to change world politics irrevocably and forever and i would remind you he has promised that he will be in office for four years only not eight he's gonna do four years and then his vice president will run for election to take over so he has come in with a short span of time to leave his mark on world history and from day one in office he declared loud and clear the military alliance with saudi arabia is over america and saudi arabia are no longer friends but enemies and to my astonishment the alliance between the united states and china which dates back to richard dixon and the strategic triangle the iron triangle that that is over that the world will change forever and with both of those the question is okay well if those if those people if your former allies are now your enemies who who are your new allies saudi arabia responded to being cut off from american military support immediately by turning to china i i looked it up because i wondered oh will saudi arabia now pursue a partnership with russia because just militarily russians make very good military hardware at a low price you could start arming yourself with russian tanks and russian aircraft no china and saudi arabia has quite positive uh political relations with china and they turn around immediately and they start talking to china and they're in a situation where they need to spend millions and billions of dollars immediately to buy military hardware that they were expecting the united states and now aren't getting and they're they're in the middle of a to them a desperately important war so i mean this is a good example of how this works okay well you know if these people are no longer an alliance they've got to be in line to something else you know the the cards get shuffled the dominoes start to fall uh in a different direction so i mean yeah there was this question this is just unfolded in the last few weeks and months oh okay well if this isn't just [ __ ] if this isn't just something that's going to evaporate like barack obama's pivotal asia this is real who is america's ally going to be i mean it's not going to be iran you know and the answer shockingly enough seems to be the quadrilateral agreement that we are going to have a new era of the united states and again think about how the other countries fit into this if the united states is entering into a new partnership with india what do you think england is going to do what do you think thailand is going to do there are a lot of other countries that are going to fall into place whoever is leader of the philippines now or five years from now what do you think the philippines is gonna do right all the other dominoes start to fall everything starts to stack up once you have this this powerful alliance in place so it's much more than a quadrilateral alliance it becomes a worldwide anti-china conspiracy china's worst nightmare for all these years but i have to say you know [Music] india is a very hard ally to have it's a relationship that's going to be very very hard to keep it's very hard to say and i know i know americans don't care about this you know it's very hard to say what the reaction is going to be from pakistan what the impacts are going to be in afghanistan what the impacts are going to be in in central asia and it is true that since world war ii india has had relatively few conflicts with its neighbors right they just had a conflict with china you all remember that if you look it up there was a time when india invaded sri lanka when they deployed the military in an intervention in sri lanka there's a tiny country you may not know about called bhutan you know there was india's invasion of goa goa goa goa used to be a separate country kind of like hong kong was separate from china um there has always been this potential for a much more bellicose and expansionist india and india is certainly committed to ruling a very large part of the world's oceans as is indicated by their naval presence at port blair um the the long arm of the indian empire heading out through the the andaman islands so india has been a very unappealing political partnership to have at least since september 11th uh 2001 and it may prove to be a very difficult partnership to continue with the japanese companies that are now so deeply embedded in the chinese economy whether they manufacture cars or cardboard boxes do you think those same corporations and those same men can literally relocate to india many of them have experience not just manufacturing china but also with malaysia also with vietnam not going to get into the whole economic case japan since world war ii so-called what was it the flying eagle formation no the flying flying goose formation there's this whole economic and political strategy that that um that japan had and ultimately the leaders of these zaibatsu these big corporations they they in many ways created you know the car manufacturing industry that now exists in china they created many of the most important industries in china have have roots in uh japanese partnerships okay um is that kind of partnership possible between the japanese and the indians we're gonna find out but the answer may be no it may be you just can't do you cannot make again in india what you already created in shanghai it may not be possible apple computer and all of the corporations in silicon valley can they do again in india what they already did in china can they relocate in some cases factories and headquarters can they do that again we're going to find out maybe right but maybe the answer is no um it's certainly easy to think of ways in which the price of alienating china could just be too high it could be too high if there's this america it could be too high for australia and for japan it could be that after a few years of trying to do politics the joe biden way because he's only got four years in office that the whole world goes back to doing what barack obama did and in some namby pamby uh you know fence mending manner goes back to trying to pursue the kind of utterly paradoxical alliance with china that was invented by richard nixon